Cursive text showing boxes?
When 𝒽𝑒𝓁𝓁𝑜 turns into a row of empty rectangles, the text is fine and a font is missing. The test below checks all twelve styles on the device you are reading this on, right now, without sending anything anywhere.
Testing this device…
| Style | Sample | Letters | Ornaments / marks |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cursive script | ℋℯ𝓁𝓁ℴ | … | … |
| Bold cursive | 𝓗𝓮𝓵𝓵𝓸 | … | … |
| Italic cursive | 𝐻𝑒𝑙𝑙𝑜 | … | … |
| Bold italic cursive | 𝑯𝒆𝒍𝒍𝒐 | … | … |
| Fancy cursive | ✦ 𝓗𝓮𝓵𝓵𝓸 ✦ | … | … |
| Aesthetic cursive | ˚₊‧ ℋℯ𝓁𝓁ℴ ‧₊˚ | … | … |
| Cursive with hearts | ♡𝓗𝓮𝓵𝓵𝓸♡ | … | … |
| Underlined cursive | ℋ̲ℯ̲𝓁̲𝓁̲ℴ̲ | … | … |
| Vintage cursive | ❦ ℋℯ𝓁𝓁ℴ ❧ | … | … |
| Spaced cursive | ℋ ℯ 𝓁 𝓁 ℴ | … | … |
| Struck cursive | 𝓗̶𝓮̶𝓵̶𝓵̶𝓸̶ | … | … |
| Handwritten slant | 𝙃𝙚𝙡𝙡𝙤 | … | … |
Checking someone else’s phone? Send them this line. Every style above is in it once; whichever parts turn into boxes on their screen are the styles to avoid for them.
What the box means
Cursive text is made of ordinary Unicode characters — maths letters, not a font — and a device draws each character with whichever of its installed fonts contains it. When none of them does, the font in use draws its placeholder glyph instead, the one type designers call .notdef. That placeholder is usually a rectangle, sometimes with a cross or a question mark inside, and it is the same rectangle for every character the font lacks. That is why a whole word collapses into a row of identical boxes.
Nothing has been lost. The characters are still in the text; copy the boxes and paste them somewhere with the right font and the letters reappear. The test above works the same way in reverse: it asks this device to draw several different cursive letters from the same block, and if they all come out pixel-for-pixel identical, they are boxes.
Why only some styles, or some letters
The twelve styles are not all built from one set of characters. The bold and italic alphabets sit in the Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols block, added in Unicode 3.1 in 2001. Eleven letters of the light script alphabet are older characters from the Letterlike Symbols block, which is why a name can come out with one odd letter or, on a device missing only the newer block, with most letters boxed and a few surviving. The A–Z page marks which eleven. The decorated styles add characters from other blocks again — hearts, stars, fleurons — and underlined and struck cursive attach combining marks, which a font can lack or misplace even when it has the letters.
That is why the test reports letters and extras separately. A style can have every letter and still lose its ornament.
Fine on your phone, boxes on theirs
The most common version of this problem is not on your screen at all. Current phones and computers ship a symbol font that covers the maths block, so the person writing a cursive bio usually sees it perfectly and has no idea that a follower on an older device, a smart TV or a car display is looking at rectangles. No test running on your device can see theirs. The line under the table puts every style in one row: send it to the person you are worried about and ask which parts turn into boxes.
If a lot of your audience is likely to be on older hardware, keep anything that has to be read in plain text and use cursive for the flourish around it. The compatibility guide covers the platform side — which fields accept these characters at all — which is a different question from whether a device can draw them.
What the test can and cannot tell you
- It can tell you whether this browser, with the same fonts this site uses for its output, can draw each style. Other apps on the same device usually fall back to the same system fonts, so it is a good guide to what you will see there too.
- It cannotsee any other device, and it cannot promise an app has not swapped in fonts of its own. Treat it as a check on your screen, not a guarantee about anyone else’s.
- It sends nothing. Everything happens in this tab; there is no text of yours involved and nothing is uploaded.
Frequently asked questions
Is my cursive text broken if it shows as boxes?
No. The characters are intact; the device drawing them has no font that contains them, so it draws a placeholder instead. Copy the boxes and paste them on a device that has the font and the cursive letters come back, because they were there all along.
Why do only some letters turn into boxes?
Because the letters of one style do not all come from the same place. Eleven letters of the light script alphabet — ℬ ℰ ℱ ℋ ℐ ℒ ℳ ℛ ℯ ℊ ℴ — live in an older Unicode block than the rest, so a device can have a font for one block and not the other. Ornaments such as ♡ and ✦ come from other blocks again. The test on this page checks each of those separately.
It looks fine on my phone but my friend sees boxes. Why?
The text is the same on both phones; the fonts are not. Each device draws the characters with its own fonts, and the test here can only check the one it is running on. Send your friend the test line from this page and ask which parts turn into boxes on their screen.
What is the difference between a box, a question mark and a blank?
A box is a missing font: the character arrived, nothing can draw it. A question mark or the replacement character � usually means the text itself was damaged on the way, for example by being passed through something that only understands an older character set — the original character is gone and pasting it again will not bring it back. A blank can be either: some fonts draw nothing at all for a character they lack.
Which style is least likely to show boxes?
Run the test above rather than trusting a general answer, because it depends on the fonts a particular device has. Where a device is missing the maths letters entirely, every cursive style will fail together, since all of them are built from that block. Ornaments and combining marks are extra things to be missing, so the plain script styles have fewer ways to fail than the decorated ones.