Tweaks: ̶T̶ ᵃ ᴀ Ａ Ɐ ᖷ Fonts: 𝐀 𝐴 𝑨 𝖠 𝗔 𝘈 𝘼
Shapes: 𝔸 🄐 Ⓐ 🄰 🅐 🅰 Styles: ᗩ ᚤ 𝙰 𝒜 𝓐 𝔄 𝕬

The Ministry of Fancy Text is an online tool to apply a number of text transformations and effects without changing fonts or requiring any extra tools. It's all in the symbols.

Strikethrough effect is pretty simple: there's a special symbol called "combining long stroke" ̶ , which slightly overlaps the characters before and after it. Therefore, should you insert one of these between every character in a text, it will appear to be striked out.
Being a common symbol, it is displayed correctly pretty much everywhere.

Superscript effect uses a handful of different special characters to make the text appear smaller and above the line. Good both for small notes and exponents. Widely supported.

Small caps effect makes small letters ("lowercase") appear styled like large letters ("capitalized"). Ideal for situations where something is to be highlighted, but writing in all-capital letters would be inappropriate. Widely supported.

Fullwidth effect makes letters appear more widely spaced. It is generally intended for use with CJK (Chinese, Japanese and Korean) glyphs, but is commonly used for stylization.
Fairly widely supported, though some fonts will display these as non-spaced styled characters instead.

Upside down effect makes the letters appear flipped (rotated 180 degrees). Since there aren't "flipped" versions for most letters, creative use of any glyphs that look akin to flipped letters is required. But, aside of some occasional wonkyness, this works pretty well.

Mirror effect makes the letters appear, well, mirrored. Same as with "flipped" effect, except finding symbols that look like mirrored other symbols is somehow harder.

Math serif symbol sets permit you to write in bold and/or italic styled text even if the website in question does not support making text bold/italic.
So far the related symbols are only supported on desktop browsers.

Math sans symbol sets look very much like regular text would, but can be styled to appear bold/italic. Again, useful for posting text anywhere where text decoration is not supported.

Outlined ("double struck") effect is pretty widely supported and makes characters appear to be hollowed out.

Parenthesised effect makes most symbols appear enclosed in parenthesis (). Smaller symbols are enclosed in smaller parenthesis. Personally I'm not really sure of intended uses for these symbols, but if they are included, there probably are some.

Circled effect encloses each symbol in a circle. Fairly widely supported. Some non-letter symbols (.,+-/_ etc.) have circled versions too.

Squared effect encloses each symbol in a square. Fairly widely supported.

Negative circled effect makes each symbol to be cut out of a circle. Fairly widely supported.

Canadian syllabics is a family of alphabets used to write a number of aboriginal Canadian languages. Both the history and principles of the alphabet are curious - each symbol represents a syllable, and can be written in 4 ways, determining the way it is read.
... and here we are borrowing a bunch of symbols from it and Cherokee syllabary to produce a particularly round/wavy text style.

Runic alphabets were used to write various Germanic languages before Latin alphabet was widely adopted. Here, a handful of runes are used to create an effect that gives Latin characters a runic look.

Mathematical monospace glyphs all have the same width, should you need that. Not too widely supported yet.

Mathematical script is a kind of fancy cursive writing. Very good for applying such stylization where you usually aren't supposed to be able to. Akin to other mathematical styles, not too widely supported.

Gothic (Fraktur) is originally a blackletter typeface from German region, letters of which are included in Unicode for use in mathematics. That, of course, does not prevent you from using it for other purposes. Fancy, and widely supported on desktop devices, but less so on mobile devices.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How does this work?
A: The commonly used standard for text representation is Unicode.
It covers over 110 thousand different characters, including letters of many languages, special symbols, decorative letters and symbols, emoji, and more.
With so many different symbols it is possible to pick groups of ones that serve (or seem to) a specific purpose or have a similar visual style.
This page allows to "convert" text into a number of distinctive visual styles.
And, since the only thing changing is the actual characters, resulting text can be copied practically anywhere, even if application or website does not support conventional text formatting methods.

Q: Where does this work?
A: Pretty much on any website - Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, VK, etc., as well as in multiple games that support non-English symbols in chat\names.

Q: Why aren't some characters showing up?
A: Showing symbols is up to the browser and/or system.
Namely, whether you have a font with needed symbol(s) installed, and whether your browser (or other program that you copy text to) can pick an appropriate font to display the characters.
For example, mobile devices gladly display a wide range of Emojis, but often overlook glyphs from less commonly used languages.

(FAQ under construction)