Fortune Favors the 𝐁𝐨𝐥𝐝

Your results may vary.

See what I did there?

The Substack editor doesn’t allow bold or italics in a title or a button caption. However, it does allow Unicode characters other than the ones you normally type.

Unicode has “confusables,” which are characters that look like other characters. You can type letters, numbers, punctuation, etc. on the Unicode confusables page to see all the alternatives.

The confusables include more than bold and italic versions. An easy way to find many possibilities is to input a word or other text in YayText. You can then press the “Copy” button next to the style you want and then paste it in the Substack editor.

The Substack editor might not recognize every style. The style might not work exactly as you expect on both mobile and desktop, or both website and email, which you can check with the Preview button on the editor.¹

And the style might not work in some search engines. Google handles many styles well, understanding the transformed characters as a word. Bing acts like you are searching only for pages with the transformed characters. Substack’s search engine typically doesn’t return any results for words with transformed characters, since most newsletters don’t use those characters.

So you are taking a chance in terms of discoverability if you use confusable characters in place of the normal ones. But your text may stand out from the crowd. Remember: Fortune favors the bold.²

P.S.: I owe you a CBZ file. (I meant to attach it to the earlier post, but forgot.) So, here it is.

Original

6.21KB ∙ CBZ file

Read now

Read now

Don’t open it with a comics file reader. It doesn’t contain a comic. Just rename it as a ZIP file and then unzip it.

As a bonus, it includes another CBZ file, which you can likewise rename as a ZIP file. The contents of both CBZ files are the same; only the file names were changed.

I didn’t include a 1 GB file. But if you want to tempt fate or possibly annoy the engineers at Substack, you could.

1. The style might have a different look or effect from website to email. For example, the word “Bold” in the title of this post will be in serif font, while the rest of the title will change from serif on the web to sans serif in email.

2. Technically, Matt Damon says “fortune favors the brave.” (Even more technically, he apparently says "favours.”) Still, I feel that he also means it favors the bold.