Bold Word Starts

about this tool

What it does

Each word gets its first few letters in bold: Reading on a screen. The idea is that the bold start gives the eye a landmark at every stop, and the mind fills in the rest of the word. Whether that helps is personal: studies have found no reliable gain in speed on average, but some readers, often those who lose their place in long text, find it makes a page easier to stay with.

The settings

• Bold sets how much of each word: a third (light), half (medium) or two thirds (strong), rounded up. A word of one to three letters always gets one bold letter, and no longer word is ever bold all the way through.
• Words marks every word, every second or every third. Marking fewer words makes the page calmer, at the cost of fewer landmarks.

Words are letters with any accents, and apostrophes inside them, so isn’t is one word and well-known two; a bold start never stops on the apostrophe. Numbers on their own are left plain, though a word that starts with one, such as 3D or 1990s, is bolded like any other. Web and email addresses are left whole and unbolded. Languages written without spaces between words, such as Chinese, Japanese and Thai, are left as they are.

Copying the result

• Formatted copies real bold text, for a document, an email or a note. Anywhere that cannot take formatting gets the plain text.
• HTML wraps the bold parts in <b>, a paragraph in <p> and a single line break in <br>, with the text escaped.
• Markdown wraps them in **. Any *, _, #, & or other character Markdown would act on is escaped first, indentation that would make a code block is dropped, and a single line break ends in a backslash, so the result renders as the text as it was, plus the bold. Web and email addresses are written as links; an email address with letters outside A to Z is left as plain text.
• Unicode bold writes the bold parts in the mathematical sans-serif bold letters, for places with no formatting at all. They look bold but are different characters: screen readers may spell them out or skip them, and search will not find the words. Only the letters A to Z, most accented ones among them, and the digits have them; other letters stay plain. Use it sparingly.

Limits

Up to 100,000 characters at a time. The preview uses a sans-serif face, since the bold starts read better in proportional type than in the site's monospace. Nothing is uploaded.

For a measure of how hard the text is to read in the first place, run it through the readability checker.

questions

Does bolding the start of words make reading faster?

The evidence is thin. Small studies have found no reliable gain in reading speed or comprehension on average, but some readers, including some with ADHD or dyslexia, say it helps them keep their place and stay with a long text. It costs nothing to try, so paste a page you have to read anyway and judge for yourself.

How much of each word is bolded?

One letter of a word of up to three letters, and otherwise a share of the word rounded up: a third for light, half for medium and two thirds for strong; only a one-letter word is bolded whole. Every word can be marked, or every second or third word, which some find less busy.

Which copy format should I use?

Formatted for a document, an email or a note: it pastes as real bold text. HTML for a web page or a template, Markdown for a README, a wiki or a chat that reads Markdown. Unicode bold only where no formatting is possible, such as a social profile: it uses look-alike mathematical letters, which screen readers may spell out letter by letter and search does not match.

Does it work with other languages?

With any language that puts spaces between words, accents included: é and ñ are bolded as single letters. Chinese, Japanese, Thai and other languages written without spaces are left as they are, because there is no word boundary to bold from. Unicode bold exists only for the letters A to Z, most accented forms included, and the digits.

Is my text sent anywhere?

No. The text is marked up in your browser and nothing is uploaded or kept.