Italics Without a Formatting Bar: What They Mean and What to Use Instead

The Associated Press wrote its rules for copy sent down news wires, and for most of the twentieth century a wire could not transmit italic type. So AP style puts book and film titles in quotation marks instead, and treats newspaper names as plain text. Newspapers that follow AP still do this today, long after the technical reason disappeared.

That history is useful on social media, which is in the same position the wire services were. If a platform cannot set italics, AP has already worked out a consistent alternative: quotation marks for titles, plain text for publications, and rewording rather than typographic emphasis. Following it means your caption reads like edited copy rather than a workaround.

Unicode italics are the other option. They look exactly like the Chicago convention, which suits a book or film title in a caption, provided you accept the costs that come with the characters.

The cases where Unicode italic does well are the ones where nobody needs to search for the words and a single phrase carries the styling. A quoted line in a caption, a book title in a bio ("author of 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘓𝘰𝘯𝘨 𝘞𝘢𝘺 𝘏𝘰𝘮𝘦"), a foreign phrase in a travel post or a short aside all suit it.

Pick italic sans when the italic sits inside a sentence of normal text. It is the closest match to the app's own font, so it reads as emphasis. Serif italic stands out more, which works for a title or a quote that should look set apart.

Bold italic is the strongest of the three and is best kept to a single word. Two kinds of emphasis on one phrase usually means neither is doing much.