# How to bold just one word in a line

If I have a line of text, how do I make just the first word bold?

I tried this:

\bf{NTn} = Number of lines


but it made the entire line bold.

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Use \textbf{Some text in bold}. – Ali Mehrizi May 16 '12 at 5:16
– Werner May 16 '12 at 5:35
\bf is an outdated font switch, not a macro with an argument, i.e. itr works to the end of the group. You would need to use {\bf NTn} instead, but should not use the font commands any longer. Use \textbf{..} or {\bfseries ..} instead. – Martin Scharrer May 16 '12 at 7:45

You should not use \bf. Instead use {\bfseries ....}.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{amsmath}
\begin{document}

{\bfseries NTn} = Number of lines

$\mathbf{NTn} + \boldsymbol{\pi} + \pmb{\pi}$ = Number of lines.

\verb|\boldsymbol| and \verb|\pmb| are provided by \verb|amsmath| package. Note that \verb|\mathbf| has no effect on symbols like $+$ or $-$ or $\pi$ etc.

\end{document}


However, it is better to use \bm from bm package for such needs which gives correct results.

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Thanks, but what if I need to bold the following: $NT_n$ ? {\bfseries $NT_n$} doesn't work..... – ngramsky May 16 '12 at 5:16
@ngramsky, for math mode, use \mathbf{e^{j\pi}=-1}'. – Ali Mehrizi May 16 '12 at 5:22
For bolding math you can use \boldmath, \boldsymbol or \pmb. For mor details see here – adn May 16 '12 at 5:23
@ngramsky: see the edited answer. – Harish Kumar May 16 '12 at 5:29
@HarishKumar I stumbled upon this answer and find it very wrong. For instance \boldmath works just by chance and throws warnings; \boldsymbol is deprecated and \bm (from the bm package) should be used. – egreg Nov 2 '14 at 10:14

For regular, bold and italics math, use the bm package:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{bm}% http://ctan.org/pkg/bm
\begin{document}
$NTn=\bm{NTn}=\mbox{Number of lines}$
\end{document}

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this works for me

\textbf{BOLD}

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This answer is very short and does not provide some new solution – Christian Hupfer Nov 2 '14 at 9:34
Actually, \textbf` was only mentioned in comments. – lockstep Nov 2 '14 at 10:51