Cursive font keyboard

Why there is no cursive key

A keyboard chooses a language and a layout. It does not choose a typeface, because it does not own the place the text lands. When you tap a letter, the keyboard hands a character to the text field, and the app that owns that field decides which font draws it — which is why the same message looks like Instagram in Instagram and like Messages in Messages. A keyboard that could override that would be able to restyle text inside somebody else’s app.

So the only way to make text look cursive in a field you do not control is to send different characters. 𝒽 is not an h in a script font; it is its own character, with its own number, that most fonts happen to draw with a loop. That is what every cursive keyboard in the store is doing, and it is what the box at the top of this page does.

What a keyboard app can read

This is the part the “best cursive keyboards” lists tend to leave out, and it is worth reading before installing one for a decorative alphabet.

On iPhone, a third-party keyboard runs sandboxed, and Apple’s developer documentation is blunt about what changes when it asks for more. Without the extra permission, “users know that keystrokes go only to the app that’s currently using the keyboard.” With it — the Allow Full Accessswitch in Settings — “the keyboard can send keystrokes and other input events for server-side processing,” and “the keyboard can access Location Services and Contacts, with user permission.” Apple’s own summary of the decision is that “enabling open access shouldn’t be done lightly. Keyboards handle some of the most sensitive user data.” Apple’s documentation for keyboard developers is where those sentences come from.

On Android the reach is in the design of the interface a keyboard talks through. Google describes it as “the communication channel from an InputMethod back to the application that is receiving its input,” used for “reading text around the cursor, committing text to the text box, and sending raw key events to the application” — the InputConnection reference. Reading the text around the cursor is a normal thing for a keyboard to do; it is how autocorrect works. It is also more than a decorative alphabet needs.

None of that makes keyboard apps malicious. It makes the trade explicit: a system-wide extension that sees what you type, in exchange for saving you a copy and a paste. The box at the top of this page runs in your browser and sends nothing anywhere, which is a smaller thing to trust.

Changing your phone’s font is a different setting

Searches for cursive on a phone usually turn up two unrelated answers, and it is easy to end up in the wrong one. Some Android phones have a font setting that changes the typeface of the interface; iPhone has text size and bold text rather than a typeface picker. Either way, the setting changes what your screendraws. It does not travel with a message, because what travels is characters. Your friend’s phone will draw those characters with your friend’s fonts, exactly as in the figure above.

That is the whole difference in one line: a font setting changes your view of everything; cursive characters change the text itself, everywhere it goes. It is the same distinction that decides whether to use a font or paste characters in a document.

Doing it without installing anything

1. Type the words in the box at the top of this page. It works the same in Safari, Chrome and any other mobile browser.
2. Tap Copy on the style you want. Bold cursive holds up best at small sizes, which is most of a phone.
3. Go to the field you want it in, press and hold, and choose Paste.

For a single initial rather than a whole line, the letter pages have each capital and lowercase on its own. For a name, the name generator has two hundred ready to copy. Before it goes anywhere that matters, the compatibility guide says which fields accept it and which strip it.

Where it will and will not go

Bios, captions, comments, statuses and messages take these characters everywhere we have tested. Display names mostly do, with two exceptions worth knowing before you try: Facebook wants a real name in that field and LinkedIn’s moderation strips styled letters out of it. Usernames refuse them everywhere — they are restricted to plain ASCII by design. Decorated styles that attach a mark to each letter, like underlined cursive, are the ones most likely to come apart in a phone field, because some input boxes remove combining marks as you paste. Ornaments that sit beside the words, like the hearts style, are separate characters and survive better.