Hello everyone,
As a Roblox developer, it gets very hard to design UI when I have limited text formatting and emphasizing choices. For example, italics; the only property that is italicized is SourceSansItalic. And, there are only 6 fonts that are bolded: GothamSemibold, SourceSansSemibold, ArialBold, GothamBold, SourceSansBold, GothamBlack. As you can see, text emphasis is quite limited.
View all Roblox fonts
- Antique
- Arcade
- Arial
- ArialBold
- Bodoni
- Cartoon
- Code
- Fantasy
- Garamond
- Gotham
- GothamBlack
- GothamBold
- GothamSemibold
- Highway
- Legacy
- SciFi
- SourceSans
- SourceSansBold
- SourceSansItalics
- SourceSansLight
- SouceSansSemibold
Instead of the current system (where we have actual fonts being italicized/bolded like SourceSansItalic), it would be much better to have boolean properties to format text. Having properties like “Bold” and “Italicize” for TextLabels, TextButtons, and TextBoxes would allow all fonts on Roblox to be bolded and/or italicized (i.e. Antique, Cartoon, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, etc. would each format while staying as the font they currently are). Similar to SourceSansLight, please also consider adding a property that would decrease the weight of the font.
In addition to these three properties, being able to have to underline and strikethrough each and every font would be awesome! For those who do not know, strikethrough is basically crossing out text:
The above is from Google Docs.
Because these would be boolean properties, we should be able to combine all of these formatting features if all of them are enabled (i.e. bold and italics).
As you can see, Google Docs and many other websites/applications are already utilizing these useful text formatting features, and Roblox should, too! I do not see any way that the Roblox engine cannot handle this, so this should not be a problem (but, please correct my assumption if I am wrong).
If this feature was to be added, it would improve my development experience because I would essentially have a broader choice of fonts. Us, UI designers, will be able to vary text in our UIs–significantly more than we can now. Moreover, we will be able to emphasize text while using the same font family; this establishes consistency throughout all text in our UIs.
Use Cases
Note: These are not created in Studio; instead, they are created on Google Drawings where I can format all fonts.
Long paragraphs of information that may cause the reader to skip, in which text emphasis highlights the main and most important details. This uses bold, italics, underline, and strikethrough.
Differentiating between headings and subheadings (“Train Trouble” and “Open Plains”, respectively). This utilizes bold, italics, and light font.
Like always, if you have more use cases, please free to share!
Conclusion
To put it briefly, the current way of italics and bolding is quite irregular as only some of the available fonts are italicized or bolded. But, by controlling emphasis with a boolean property that can be toggled on or off proves to be more useful. Additional text formatting features (such as underline and strikethrough) prove to be just as useful.
Thank you for your time and feedback,
and Happy Thanksgiving 
!