A Comprehensive Guide to Discord Text Formatting

Discord is one of the best VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) apps that forever transformed the gaming community. It is an amazing platform that allows you to connect with your friends and like-minded people. You can chat, call, share images, files, hang out in groups, carry out discussions and presentations, and so much more. It is jam-packed with features, has an uber-cool interface, and most essentially completely free to use.

Now the first few days at Discord seem a little overwhelming. There is so much going on that it’s difficult to comprehend. One of the things that must have caught your attention is the ostentatious chat room. Seeing people with all kinds of cool tricks like typing in bold, italics, strikethroughs, underline, and even in color makes you curious about how to do the same. Well, in that case, today is your lucky day. You have landed on a detailed and comprehensive guide to Discord text formatting. Starting from the basics to the cool and funky stuff, we are going to cover it all. So, without any further ado, let us get started.

Contents

• A Comprehensive Guide to Discord Text Formatting
• What makes Discord Text Formatting Possible?
• Getting Started with Discord Text Formatting
• Make your text Bold in Discord
• Make your text Italicized in Discord
• Make your Text both Bold and Italicized at the same time
• Underline your Text in Discord
• Create Strikethrough Text in Discord
• How to Combinbe Different Discord Text Formatting
• How to Circumvent Discord Text Formatting
• Advanced Discord Text Formatting
• Creating Code Blocks in Discord
• Create Colored Text in Discord
• Wrapping Up Discord Text Formatting

A Comprehensive Guide to Discord Text Formatting

What makes Discord Text Formatting Possible?

Before we begin with the cool tricks, let’s take a moment to understand and appreciate the technology that makes it possible to have a captivating chat room. Discord uses a smart and efficient engine called “Markdown” to format its text.

Although Markdown was originally created for basic text editors and online forums and platforms, it soon found its way to a number of apps, including Discord. It is capable of formatting words and sentences into bold, italicized, underlined, etc., by interpreting special characters like an asterisk, tilde, backslash, etc., placed before and after the word, phrase, or sentence.  

Another interesting feature of Discord text formatting is that you can add color to your text. The credit for this goes to a neat little library called Highlight.js. Now one thing that you need to understand is that Highlight.js does not allow you to directly select the desired color for your text. Instead, we need to employ several hacks like syntax coloring methods. You can create a code block in Discord and use a preset syntax highlighting profile to make the text look colorful. We will discuss this in detail later in this article.

Getting Started with Discord Text Formatting

We will be starting off our guide with the basics, i.e., bold, italics, underlined, etc. As mentioned earlier, text formatting like this is handled by Markdown.

Make your text Bold in Discord

While chatting on Discord, you often feel the need to stress upon a particular word or a statement. The easiest way to indicate importance is to make the text bold. Doing so is really simple on Discord. All that you need to do is put double-asterisk (**) before and after the text.

For e.g. **This text is in bold**

When you hit enter or send after typing, the entire sentence within asterisk will appear to be bold.

Make your text Italicized in Discord

You can also make your text appear in italics (slightly slanted) on Discord chat. To do so, simply encase the text between a pair of single asterisks(*). Unlike bold, italics only requires a single asterisk instead of the two.

For e.g. Typing out the following: *This text is in italics* will make the text appear italicized in the chat.

Make your Text both Bold and Italicized at the same time

Now if you want to combine both the effects, then you need to use three asterisks. Start and end your sentence with three asterisks (***), and you are sorted.

Underline your Text in Discord

Another great way to draw attention to a specific detail is by underlining the text. For example, the date or timings of an event that you do not want your friends to forget. Well, fear not, Markdown has you covered.

The special character that you need in this case is the underscore (_). In order to underline a section of the text place double underscore (__) at its start and end. The text between the double underscores will appear underlined in the text.

For e.g., Typing out “ __This section__ will be underlined” will make “This section” appear underlined in the chat.

Create Strikethrough Text in Discord

The next item on the list is creating strikethrough text. If you would like to cross out certain words in a sentence, simply add the tilde (~~) sign twice before and after the phrase.

For e.g. ~~This text is an example of strikethrough.~~

When you type the following and hit enter, you will see that a line has been drawn through the entire sentence when it appears in chat.

How to Combinbe Different Discord Text Formatting

Just like we combined bold and italics earlier, it is possible to incorporate other effects as well. For example, you can have an underlined and bold text or a strikethrough italicized text. Given below is the syntax for creating various combined text formats.

1. Bold and underlined (Double underscore followed by a double asterisk): __**Add text here**__

2. Italicized and Underlined (Double underscore followed by a single asterisk): __*Add text here*__

3. Bold, italicized, and underlined (Double underscore followed by a triple asterisk): __***Add text here***___

Also Read: Fix Can’t Hear People on Discord (2021)

How to Circumvent Discord Text Formatting

By now you must have understood that special characters like an asterisk, tilde, underscore, etc., are an important part of Discord text formatting. These characters are like instructions for Markdown as to what kind of formatting it needs to do. However, at times these symbols could be a part of the message and you want them to be displayed as-is. In this case, you are basically asking Markdown to treat them as any other character.

All that you need to do is add a backslash (\) in front of every character and this will ensure that the special characters are displayed in the chat.

For example, if you type: \_\_\*\*Print this message as it is\*\*\_\_ it will be printed along with the underscores and asterisks before and after the sentence.

Take note that the backslashes at the end are not necessary, and it will still work if you add backslashes only in the beginning. Additionally, if you are not using underscore then you can simply add one backslash at the beginning of the sentence (for e.g. \**Print the asterisks) and it will get the job done.

With that, we come to the end of basic Discord text formatting. In the next section, we will discuss some of the more advanced stuff like creating code blocks and of course writing messages in color.

Advanced Discord Text Formatting

The basic Discord text formatting requires only a few special characters like an asterisk, backslash, underscore, and tilde. With that, you can bold, italicize, strikethrough, and underline your text. With a little practice, you will get used to them pretty easily. After that, you can proceed with more advanced stuff.

Creating Code Blocks in Discord

A code block is a collection of lines of code enclosed in a text box. It is used to share snippets of code with your friends or team members. The text contained in a code block gets sent without any kind of formatting and is displayed exactly as it is. This makes it an effective way to share multiple lines of text that has asterisk or underscore, as Markdown will not read these characters as indicators for formatting.

Creating a code block is pretty simple. The only character that you need is a backtick (`). You will find this key just below the Esc key. To create a single line code block, you need to add a single backtick before and after the line. However, if you want to create a multi-line code block, then you need three backticks (“`) placed at the beginning and end of the lines. Given below are examples of single and multi-line code blocks:-

Single line code block:

`This is an example of a single line code block`

Multi-line code block:

```This is an example of the multi-line code block

You can add different lines and symbols ***

It will appear as it __is **.

Without any changes“`

Also Read: How to Fix No Route Error on Discord (2021)

Create Colored Text in Discord

As mentioned earlier, there is no direct way to create colored text in Discord. Instead, we are going to use some clever tricks and hacks to get the desired color for our texts. We will be exploiting the syntax highlighting feature included in Highlight.js to create colored text.

Now Discord relies heavily on complex Javascript programs (including Highlight.js), which are running in the background. Although Discord natively does not have any color-changing capability for its text, the Javascript engine running in the background does. This is what we are going to take advantage of. We are going to trick Discord into thinking that our text is a code snippet by adding a small programming language reference in the beginning. Javascript has a preset color code for different syntax. This is known as Syntax Highlighting. We are going to use this to highlight our text.

Before we start painting our chat room, there are a few things that you need to keep in mind. In order to get any kind of colored text, you need to enclose the text in multi-line code blocks using three backticks. At the start of each code block, you need to add the specific syntax highlighting code that will determine the color of the contents of the code block. For every color, there is a different syntax highlighting that we are going to use. Let’s discuss these in detail.

1. Red Color for Text in Discord

In order to create a text that appears red in the chat room, we will be using the “Diff syntax highlighting.” All that you need to do is add the word ‘diff’ at the beginning of the code block and start the sentence with a hyphen (-).

Sample code block:

```diff - This text will be red ```

2. Orange Color for Text in Discord

For orange, we will be using the “CSS syntax highlighting”. Take note that you need to enclose the text within square brackets ([]).

Sample code block:

```css [This text will be orange] ```

3. Yellow Color for Text in Discord

This is probably the easiest one. We will be using the “Fix syntax highlighting” to color our text yellow. You do not need to use any other special character within the code block. Simply start the code block with the word ‘fix,’ and that’s it.

Sample code block:

```fix This text will be yellow ```

4. Green Color for Text in Discord

You can get green color using both the ‘css’ and ‘diff’ syntax highlighting. If you are using ‘CSS’ then you need to write the text within quotation marks. For ‘diff’, you have to add a plus (+) sign before the text. Given below are samples for both of these methods.

Sample code block:

```CSS “This text will be green.” ```

Sample code block:

```diff +This text will be green ```

If you want a darker shade of green, then you can also use the “bash syntax highlighting”. Just make sure that the text is enclosed within quotes.

Sample code block:

```bash "This text will be dark green" ```

Also read: Discord Not Opening? 7 Ways To Fix Discord Won’t Open Issue

5. Blue Color for Text in Discord

The blue color can be attained using the “ini syntax highlighting”. The actual text needs to be enclosed within square brackets([]).

Sample code block:

```ini [This text will be blue] ```

You can also use css syntax highlighting but it has certain limitations. You won’t be able to add spaces between words. Instead, you need to enter the sentence as a long string of words separated by an underscore. Also, you need to add a dot (.) at the beginning of the sentence.

Sample code block:

```css .This_text_will_be_blue” ```

6. Highlight text instead of coloring it

All the syntax highlighting techniques that we discussed above can be used to change the color of the text. However, if you simply want to highlight the text and not color it, then you can use the “Tex syntax.” Apart from beginning the block code with ‘tex’, you need to start the sentence with a dollar sign.

Sample code block:

```tex $This text will simply be highlighted ```

Wrapping Up Discord Text Formatting

With that, we have more or less covered all the important Discord text formatting tricks that you will need. You can further explore more tricks by referring to Markdown tutorials and online videos that demonstrate another advanced formatting that you can do using Markdown.

You will easily find a number of Markdown tutorials and cheat sheets for free on the internet. In fact, Discord itself has added an Official Markdown guide for the benefit of users.

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With that, we come to the end of this article on a comprehensive guide to discord text formatting. We hope that you find this information helpful. Discord text formatting is really a cool thing to learn. Mixing up normal texts with bold, italics, and underlined ones can break the monotony.

In addition to that, if your entire gang learns color coding, then you can make the chat rooms look aesthetically pleasing and interesting. Although creating colored text comes with some limitations as you need to follow some syntax protocols in some cases, you will get used to it soon. With a little practice, you will be able to use the right syntax without referring to any guide or cheat sheet. So, without any further delay, get practicing.