10 Easy Discord Text Formatting Guide For Beginners

learn the basics behind discord text formatting engine basic formatting commands and you learn how to type out text in boxes and code blocks in color. you are still learning the commands though it may be a good idea to keep this page open for reference.

while we sit there chatting away on discord day after day there a sleek lightweight engine working in the background formatting all of our text this “engine” is called markdown.

Highlight.JS Makes Color Possible

I wanted to explain another neat feature the discord developers added it’s a library called highlight.js I want to make it clear that discord doesn’t have true full-text highlighting. you can’t say “I want this word to be in red and this one to be in blue” that kind of highlighting doesn’t exist.

what does exist for our text-coloring purposes though is a “NOW” version of text highlighting using syntax coloring methods from highlight.js even though we can’t directly highlight text we can create a code block in discord point it towards a specific syntax highlighting profile included in highlight.js and then use that to our advantage by wrapping our text in the appropriate symbols. this will all make much more sense when we get to some juicy examples down below.

How To Discord Text Formatting Easy

I’m going to show you how to bold, italicize, underline, and strikethrough text as a starting point. start with the basics and then move on into creating code blocks for text coloring.

How To Bold Text In Discord

• to create bolded text in discord all you have to do is start and end the bolded text with two asterisks (*)
• the asterisk is shift+8 on your keyboard.
• if you look at the image below you are noticing that I put two asterisks or stars in front of and after the text I wanted to be in bold.

How To Italicize Text In Discord

• to create italics or italicized text in discord, you have to type the asterisk once again, but this time use only one asterisk.
• to the bold text, we used two asterisks like this ** bold text **
• for italics, we would do the same thing but with one single asterisk italicized text.
• the asterisk star is shift+8 on your keyboard.

How To Create Bold Italicized Text In Discord

• you might’ve been able to guess the markdown for bold + italics by now
• instead of only one or two asterisks it’s three asterisks.

here’s an example of *** TEXT ***

How To Underline Text In Discord

• to format our text as underlined, we need two use two underscores ( __ )
• this is meant to be thorough I’m including the keyboard layout for an underscore below.
  • in case you are reading this and have never yet had to type an underscore before.

here’s an example of _ TEXT  _

How To Create Strikethrough Text In Discord

• for strikethrough text, we need to use the tilde (~) key.
• two tildes cross out, or ‘strike through’ the text you type.
• here’s the keyboard layout (yellow highlighted keys) for typing a tilde. you have to hit shift + ~

here’s an example of ~~ TEXT ~~

Underlined And Italicized Text

here’s an example of __* TEXT *__

Underlined And Bolded Text

here’s an example of __** TEXT **__

Underlined, Italicized, And Bolded Text

here’s an example of __*** TEXT ***__

Single Line Code Blocks In Discord

to create a single line code block in discord you need to use the ‘TEXT’ character `

the ‘tick’ or ‘backtick’ character should be in the upper left corner of your keyboard right under the escape (ESC) key once you are familiar with the ‘backtick’ key let’s create a single line code block. all you have to do is put a single backtick before and after your text.

here’s an example of `TEXT`

Multiple Line Code Blocks In Discord

here’s an example of ```TEXT ...
... multiple TEXT ...
... for code blocks ``` 

Formatting On International Keyboard Layouts

international keyboard layouts should be considered as well here we make the assumption of the asterisk being “shift + 8” and the tilde being “shift + backtick (`)” but this isn’t always the case. here are some additional keyboard layouts that international users might encounter and an example of where the asterisk would be on each of these layouts.

• german: shift+[+] (key right of ü)
• spanish: shift+[+] (key right of `^ (spain) or ´¨ (latin america))
• french (france): * (key right of ù%)
• french (belgium): shift+$ (key right of ^¨)
• french (switzerland): shift+3
• italian: shift+[+] (key right of èé)
• swedish: shift+’ (key right of ä)

Conclusion

the official markdown from the discord team covers everything we talked about in this but it doesn’t go into as much detail about how we actually get each type of color. it can still be a very useful reference if you are looking for a quick refresher. good luck and have fun.