From keystroke to finished file

The three tools at a glance

IGFont has three separate outputs. Picking the right one first saves the most time, because they are not interchangeable: one produces characters, one produces a still image and one produces a video file.

Tool	What you get	Best for
Fancy Text	Styled Unicode characters as plain text — no file	Bios, display names, captions, comments, group titles
Colour Image	PNG, transparent or filled, from an auto crop up to 1080 × 1920	Thumbnails, stickers, overlays, banners, stream alerts
Video	4, 6 or 10 second clip at 30 fps, WebM or MP4	Reels, Shorts, TikTok, intros, lower thirds

1 · Fancy text: copy, paste, done

1. Type once

   The input accepts up to 80 characters. Every row below it is re-rendered as you type — there is no submit button, and nothing is sent to the server for conversion.

2. Click a row

   Clicking writes that styled version to the clipboard. The status line confirms the copy, so you can paste straight into an app without checking a second screen.

3. Ask for more

   Show more styles appends mixtures that combine two alphabets or a decoration with a bold weight. Press it again for a different set of variants.

About thirty styles are grouped into twelve families — Serif, Script, Gothic, Outline, Sans, Wide, Caps, Symbol, Small, Decorated, Glitch and Flip. None of them is a font file: every letter is swapped for a different Unicode symbol that already looks like a letter, which is why the result survives copy and paste without installing anything.

Where decorated text works, and where it does not

• Display names and bios — Instagram name, TikTok name, Discord nickname, WhatsApp status and X profile name all store the characters as they are.
• Username fields are off limits — most platforms only allow letters, digits, full stops and underscores, so decorated text is rejected there.
• Search breaks — the symbols are different code points, so nobody can find your name by typing it normally. Keep the styled version in the display name.
• Combining styles are the fragile ones — strikethrough, underline, dotted and glitch add one or more extra marks per letter. Instagram counts them against the character limit, and some games strip them entirely. Zalgo is the heaviest of the group.
• Screen readers — assistive software may read each symbol by name. Keep anything important in plain text as well.

2 · Colour text to PNG

1. Type the words

   Up to four lines of sixty characters each. Pressing Enter starts a new line and every line is centred automatically. The bundled typefaces cover Latin, Greek, Cyrillic and CJK; scripts that need contextual shaping (Arabic, Hebrew, Devanagari, Thai) are outside what the rendering library can do and would appear as empty boxes.

2. Choose a style

   Twelve looks — rainbow, sunset, ocean, gold, candy, neon, fire, ice, galaxy, chrome, holographic and hollow outline. The thumbnails are real renders produced by the same renderer as the export, not mock-ups. Each style is built from four layers: a gradient fill, an expanded stroke, a blurred glow and a drop shadow. Shuffle rolls a random combination when you want to browse.

3. Pick a font

   Seven display faces, all under the SIL Open Font License: Archivo Black, Anton, Bebas Neue, DM Serif Display, Bungee, Righteous and Pacifico. Anton, Bebas Neue and Bungee are uppercase faces — they look weak in lowercase. Pacifico needs a little extra line height because of its ascenders and descenders.

4. Set the canvas

   Auto crops tightly around the text with a small margin and is the right choice for stickers and overlays. Presets lock the frame to a known size and fit the type automatically.

   Preset	Pixels	Typical use
   Auto	cropped to the text	Stickers, overlays, chat icons
   Square	1080 × 1080	Instagram feed, profile picture, listings
   Post	1080 × 1350	Portrait feed posts, Pinterest pins
   Story	1080 × 1920	Stories, Reels covers, TikTok photos, Shorts
   Wide	1200 × 630	Open Graph previews, blog headers, thumbnails

   The text-size slider (40–320 px) only applies to Auto; with a preset the size is calculated from the frame so the words cannot overflow.

5. Choose a background

   Transparent keeps the alpha channel, so the letters sit on any photo or video without a white rectangle. Dark is the default because glow and neon bloom against it. White works with dark styles such as galaxy or chrome, and pale gradients such as holographic mostly disappear on it. The colour picker accepts any brand hex value.

6. Export

   Download PNG saves exactly what the preview shows, at the chosen canvas size, named after the style. Copy image puts the PNG on the clipboard — useful for pasting into a chat or a design tool, though it needs a browser with clipboard image support; otherwise use the download. Each preview is also an ordinary image URL with the text and settings in the query string, so it can be opened directly or embedded.

3 · Animated text video

Text and effect

Up to four short lines. Eight effects, each one a different animation rather than a filter:

• Ghost Glowing letters that float and breathe while mist drifts upward.
• Glitch RGB split, horizontal slices and scanlines — the broken-signal look.
• Neon Hollow tube letters with a flickering halo.
• Fire Molten gradient with embers rising off the baseline.
• Typewriter Letters appear one by one behind a blinking cursor.
• Wave A slow sine wave rolls through the word, column by column.
• Chrome shine A metallic highlight sweeps across the letters.
• Beat bounce The word pulses on a beat with a slight tilt.

Font and glow colour

Eleven built-in faces are loaded for this page only, so they do not slow the rest of the site. If none fits, upload your own TTF, OTF, WOFF or WOFF2 file up to 8 MB: it is registered with the FontFace API and kept in memory for the current tab, which means a licensed typeface never leaves your machine. Five glow presets are provided, plus a colour picker for anything else. Effects that grow an outline around the glyph edges — Ghost, Neon, Fire — need a bold or black weight to have something to bloom from.

Format and length

Format	Pixels	Fits
Story	1080 × 1920	Reels, TikTok, Stories, Shorts
Square	1080 × 1080	Feed posts and carousels
Wide	1920 × 1080	YouTube intros, lower thirds, presentations

Clips run for 4, 6 or 10 seconds. Match the length to your audio edit — a 4 second clip loops cleanly against two bars at 120 BPM.

Record and download

Generate video plays the animation once and captures it at 30 fps. Recording is real time, so a six second clip takes about six seconds; keep the tab in the foreground while it runs. When encoding finishes the download button appears. Replay preview loops the canvas without recording, which is the fastest way to judge timing before you commit.

Browser	File produced	Notes
Chrome, Edge, Opera	WebM (VP9)	Small files, best quality per bit
Firefox	WebM (VP8)	Same workflow
Safari 16+	MP4 (H.264)	Accepted by Instagram and TikTok
Older mobile browsers	—	Preview works, recording may be unavailable

In an editor, set the clip to Screen or Add blend mode over your footage: the black background disappears and only the glow remains. CapCut, Premiere and DaVinci accept the WebM directly; transcode to MP4 if your version is older.

What runs where

• Fancy text — entirely in your browser. The mapping tables ship with the page and the conversion never leaves the tab.
• Images — on the server. Your text and settings become a URL; the server measures the glyphs with FreeType, rasterises an anti-aliased mask, expands and blurs it for the glow and shadow, composites the gradient through the mask at the final resolution, then encodes a PNG and caches it by an MD5 of the parameters. Nothing is upscaled, so edges stay clean at 1920 pixels, and a popular combination is only rendered once.
• Video — on your device. The canvas draws the frames, captureStream() exposes them as a media stream and MediaRecorder encodes it. The server only serves the page.
• Privacy — there are no accounts and no upload of your text. Image results are cached under a hash of the parameters so they can be served again, not as a readable log of what you typed.

Getting a clean result

• Two or three words per line. Longer sentences shrink the type until the gradient stops reading as a gradient.
• Use bold or black weights for outlines, glows and every video effect.
• Keep a dark background for neon, fire, galaxy and outline styles.
• Check the small size. Shrink the preview to avatar dimensions — if the word stops being readable, move to a heavier face or a two-colour gradient.
• One style per design. Three gradients on one card read as noise; let the headline carry the effect and keep everything else quiet.
• Transparent for overlays, filled for feeds. Alpha is what lets a PNG sit on a photo without a visible box.

Troubleshooting

Symptom	Cause	Fix
Text is cut off in the PNG	A line exceeds 60 characters, or the preset is smaller than the type	Switch to Auto, shorten the line or lower the text size
Empty boxes in the PNG	Complex script that needs contextual shaping	Keep the text in Latin, Greek, Cyrillic or CJK
Boxes after pasting fancy text	The receiving app lacks that Unicode block	Use a common style: bold, cursive, small caps or circled
Copy image does nothing	No clipboard image support in the browser	Use Download PNG instead
Video download stays disabled	Browser has no MediaRecorder support	Update the browser, or export a PNG with the image tool
Ghost or neon looks faint	Hairline or light weight leaves too little edge to glow from	Pick a bold, black or condensed face