Surprise your WhatsApp contacts with creative fancy fonts in group chats and status updates.
Everything in the list pastes into a WhatsApp message and arrives as text the recipient can copy back. The place fancy text is most useful is the group name and group description, which have no formatting of their own and are seen by every member at the top of the chat: a group name in bold sans or with a lenticular bracket frame stands out in a long chat list. Group subjects are capped at 25 characters. Status updates (the disappearing kind) accept styled text as a caption. The About line under your profile name is covered on its own page.
Inside a message, WhatsApp has native bold, italic, strikethrough and monospace: *text*, _text_, ~text~, and three backticks. For emphasis in a normal conversation those are better than unicode styling, because the recipient's search will still find the word and a screen reader will read it normally. Unicode fancy text is for the moments the native formatting cannot reach, a decorative name in a group title, a stylised word in a status caption, a birthday message in script. Both render on iOS, Android, Web and Desktop.
Yes. Group subjects accept styled unicode and are capped at 25 characters. Bold sans and small caps stay readable in the chat list; script is harder to scan.
On any current iPhone or Android, yes. Very old Android phones with minimal fonts may show the mathematical alphabets as boxes; hearts and stars will still show.
In a message, no. The asterisk formatting stays searchable and reads correctly aloud. Use unicode bold where the asterisk syntax does not work: group names, the About line and status captions.