Bold \checkmark

Question

Is there any way to make amsmath's \checkmark symbol boldface?

I am aware that there are other symbols such as bbding's \CheckmarkBold or pifont's \ding{52} that do yield something similar to the desired result, but the slant of those checkmarks is very different from that of \checkmark and the output looks very odd, especially when you need to combine both regular and bold checkmarks in the same paragraph.

Answer 1

If the outline of the checkmark glyph is not only filled but stroked with a line width, then the symbol becomes bolder. The following example uses this method with the help of package pdfrender:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{amssymb}
\usepackage{pdfrender}
\newcommand*{\boldcheckmark}{%
  \textpdfrender{
    TextRenderingMode=FillStroke,
    LineWidth=.5pt, % half of the line width is outside the normal glyph
  }{\checkmark}%
}
\begin{document}
  $\checkmark$ $\boldcheckmark$
\end{document}

The result is a smooth bold character:

Answer 2

Since there is no bold checkmark provided by the fonts, there is only the last ressort of Poor man's bold provided by the package amsbsy:

\documentclass{minimal}
\usepackage{amssymb}
\usepackage{amsbsy}
\errorcontextlines=10
\begin{document}
$\checkmark$ $\pmb{\checkmark}$
\end{document}