How to write bold text in LaTeX? 2024

This article aims to show you the simplest and easiest way to write bold text in LaTeX.

Not everything in LaTeX is about equations, integrals, mathematics symbols and so on, sometimes you will want to know how to properly format text in your documents, and today you will learn how to write bold text.

Table of Contents

Bold Font

Basic text formatting tools, or in this scenario text bold, helps to highlight important concepts within some document and improves its readability. We have some basic fonts that are quite common, bold, italic and underlined, and for this tutorial we will focus mostly on bold.

Bold text in LaTeX : Normal text with emphasized text and italicized text. Image source: scijournal Author — Normal text with emphasized text and italicized text. Image source: scijournal Author

The best part of all the commands you will see here, is that you don’t need the math mode (yet), everything is written in text mode.

Bold in LaTeX

LaTeX has three basic commands for each one of the fonts used in the example above. As we mentioned we will focus on bold text.

To write something in bold we use the \textbf command, the command requires an argument, this being the text bold you want to write. For example

\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
    Stay back, I'm going to do some \textbf{science}.
\end{document}

Bold text in LaTeX : Simple text. Image source: scijournal Author — Simple text. Image source: scijournal Author

Another way to write a text bold is using the command \bfseries; to use this command you have to enclose the text to be formatted with \bfseries inside, as you can see in the example

\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
    \LaTeX can be {\bfseries quite difficult or easy}.
\end{document}

Bold use. Image source: scijournal Author

Two basic commands that are up to date and in current use. I am saying this because there is a third way to create a text bold using the \bf command, BUT this has been deprecated for a couple of years now and can cause some troubles.

Bold Italic Text

Just as other text editors, LaTeX allows to combine effects with the fonts, or in plain english, combine fonts. If you want some italic text you need the command for the italicized text \textit{}, and the \textbf{} command or \bfseries. For example

\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
Writing \textit{\textbf{bold text} with italic text}. \\
Or you can write \textbf{\textit{italic} with bold}.\\
Use the other \textit{{\bfseries bold command} this time}.
\end{document}

Bold text in LaTeX : Combined effects \bfseries, \textbf{} and \textit{} commands. Image source: scijournal Author — Combined effects \**bfseries**, \**textbf**{} and \**textit**{} commands. Image source: scijournal Author

If you combine two fonts you will preserve previous styles used, if you first used italic and then bold, italic will be preserved and combined with bold, and vice versa.

You can use the italic + bold for citations or tables references in your documents since it’s elegant and readable.

Bold or Underlined Words?

Sometimes you may need to denote something important in your document, maybe with a line underneath it and maybe you also need it to make it a text bold, well you can with LaTeX.

The command for the underline is \underline{} (pretty creative) and you can combine it with the others commands, for example

\begin{document}
\begin{center}
Another way of \underline{\textbf{highlight important information}} is \underline{using} \underline{\textit{a line below the {\bfseries words}}}.
\end{center}
\end{document}

Bold text in LaTeX : Bolds, italics and underline command. Image source: scijournal Author — Bolds, italics and underline command. Image source: scijournal Author

In the last example, we used the three basic commands.

Bold Variations

There are some variations for bold text, the first one is used to emphasize text within the text using the \emph command, depending on where you use it, the \emph command behaves as \textit{}, for example

\begin{document}
\begin{center}
Another way of \underline{\textbf{highlight important information}} is \underline{using} \underline{\textit{a line below the {\bfseries words}}}.
\end{center}
\end{document}

Bold text in LaTeX : \emph command together with bold use. Image source: scijournal Author — \**emph** command together with bold use. Image source: scijournal Author

Now you have the basic knowledge regarding making a text bold, or italic, or underlined, or all of them. I hope this post was helpful, and as always keep writing in LaTeX.

All the images were created in LaTeX by the author.

How to write bold text in LaTeX?

Bold Font

Bold in LaTeX

Bold Italic Text

Bold or Underlined Words?

Bold Variations

Further Reading

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