Why can only certain characters be printed in bold?

Question

I have been working on a program that prints bold text in the terminal in some cases, but I have been wondering, why are certain characters like *, #, and ~ not printed in bold? Also, is there anyway to get them to be printed in bold. I already know how to use escape sequences to do that, but is there some other way? Here is a code example:

#This isn't bold:  
print "\033[94m####\033[1m"

#But this is:
print "\033[94mHello\033[1m"

Edit: I'm dumb. The above code should be this instead:

print "\033[94;1m####\033[0m"

Answer 1

You are printing the bold SGR command after the text. You must print the bold command before the text for it to have an effect:

bold='\033[1m'
blue='\033[94m'
normal='\033[m'

print bold+'Hello'+normal  # This prints in bold
print bold+'###'+normal    # So does this

Reference:

• http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/files/ECMA-ST/Ecma-048.pdf