DISCORD

TEXT
FORMATTING
GUIDE

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From humble beginnings
on Discord…
I was a complete newbie back then when I joined my
first Discord channel.

People were typing in underlines, bolded letters,

strikethrough text, italics, and even colors! “How in the
world do people type in colors?!”, I thought.

I tried to type “/bold hello guys!”, but that obviously

didn’t work. It just made it obvious I had no clue what I
was doing.

You Can Learn Awesome

Discord Formatting
If you’re reading this, you’ve probably been that guy or gal (or you’re trying to avoid
all the disappointment and become a Discord formatting wiz!)

Either way, today I’m going to show you how to type out literally every single format
Discord offers.

You’ll learn the basics behind Discord’s formatting engine (Markdown &
Highlight.js), basic formatting commands (bolding, italicizing, underlining, etc.), and
you’ll learn how to type out text in boxes and code blocks — in color!

Save This Guide as a Reference

Once you have the basics down Discord formatting isn’t too bad.

While you’re still learning the commands though, it may be a good idea to keep this
page open for reference (or bookmarked).

Anyways, enough talk — let’s get formatting!

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Behind the Scenes
Discord’s Text Formatting Engine
While we sit there chatting away on Discord day after day, there’s a sleek,
lightweight engine working in the background, formatting all of our text.

This “engine” is called Markdown.

Highlight.js Makes The Rundown on

Color Possible Markdown
Before we dig into markdown I Originally created in 2004 by John
wanted to explain another neat Gruber and Aaron
feature the Discord developers added Swartz, Markdown is a markup
on. It’s a library called Highlight.js. language designed to be lightweight
and simple to read/write. It’s
Now, I want to make it clear that completely text-based and uses
Discord doesn’t have true full-text cleverly placed symbols to format
highlighting. You can’t say, “I want words in bold, italics, underlined, etc.
this word to be in red, and this one to
be in blue!”. That kind of highlighting Although it’s been most commonly
doesn’t exist. used to format readme files, forum
discussions, and to turn plain text into
What does exist for our text-coloring rich text in basic text editors,
purposes, though, is a “hacked” Discord’s developers saw its potential
version of text highlighting using and brought it into the core software.
syntax coloring methods from
highlight.js. We’re going to dig into Discord
Markdown in the next section so you
Even though we can’t directly can learn how to properly format all of
highlight text, we can create a code your messages in any way you’d like.
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.

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How to Format Text in
Discord
And now the fun begins. I’m going to show you how to
bold, italicize, underline, and strikethrough text as a
starting point.

We’ll 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’ll notice that I put two asterisks, or stars, in front
of and after the text I wanted to be in bold.

Here’s what I typed and the result it produced:

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 bold text, we used two asterisks, like this: **bold text**

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For italics, we would do the same thing but with one single asterisk:
*italicized text*

Again, the asterisk (star) is SHIFT+8 on your keyboard.

Here’s what I typed to get the result shown in the image below:

How to Create Bold Italicized

Text in Discord (Bold + Italics)
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.

How to Underline Text in Discord

To format our text as underlined, we need two use two underscores (__)

This is meant to be a thorough guide, so I’m including the keyboard layout for an
underscore below (in case you’re reading this and have never yet had to type an
underscore before!):

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I typed this to get the result below:

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 + ~.

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Here's what I typed below:

Combining Text Formatting

Options Even Further
We can also combine the underline into bold, italics, and bold+italics.

Here’s an example:

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How to ‘Escape’ Text and See All
Your Underscores and Asterisks
In case you actually want to see your underscores or asterisks in a message (like in
an emoji, for example), you can use the backslash ‘\’ key to skip markdown
formatting and show the text just like it is.

Take a peek at the example below (notice the backslashes ‘\’ at the beginning of
each character).

The excessive backslashes are needed here because I have underscores in my

message.

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But notice that the backslashes at the end actually aren’t required if you have them
all in the beginning:

That Concludes Basic Formatting

And that’s it for basic formatting. It’s pretty simple stuff, and you should have it
down after a few messages.

The only keys you have to remember are Underscores, Asterisks (Stars), and
Backslashes.

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Advanced Text Formatting in
Discord: Writing in Color
And now we get to the fun part… formatting our discord
messages in color!

Once you start getting some colorful messages out

there in the channels you frequently visit, you’ll start
getting asked how it’s done.

We’re going to cover some basics (code blocks), and

then jump right into coloring your messages! Let’s get
to it!

Single Line Code Blocks in Discord

To create a single line code block in discord, you need to use the ‘tick’ or ‘backtick’
character: `.

Since this key can be a difficult key to find if you’ve never had to use it before (up
until this point), I included a nice highlighted keyboard layout diagram below:

The ‘tick’ or ‘backtick’ character should be in the upper left corner of your
keyboard right under the escape (ESC) key.

Once you’re 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.

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Here’s what I wrote for the example below:

Multiple Line (Multiline) Code

Blocks in Discord
Just like the single line code block, multi-line code blocks also use the backtick (“`)
character. The only difference is, instead of writing a single backtick (`) you have to
write three (“`) before and after your text.

The neat thing here is that you can press enter and space your text across multiple
lines, all formatted in a single multi-line code block.

Here’s the markdown for the example below:

You’ll notice in the image above that we have all of our text in a code block, but this
time it’s in multiple lines just like we wanted.

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How to Format Colored Text in
Discord
And now the moment we’ve all been waiting for… [drumroll] … Colored Text!

I was searching around the web for a good example of some colored text formatting
in Discord, but couldn’t find anything clear.

There were some examples, but they were pretty hazy. I couldn’t find a single guide
that clearly showed you how to format your text if you wanted it to be in a certain
color.

We’re Essentially "Hacking" Syntax

Highlighting
As I mentioned in the intro, what we’re going to be doing here is ‘hacking’ or
‘hijacking’ syntax highlighting from Highlight.js running in the background in
Discord.

We have to do this because, as of writing this, Discord doesn’t have built-in text
highlighting functions.

As a result, we’ll have to do a little bit of a workaround — but as long as it works, it

works!

Here’s How Text Coloring in

Discord Works
Since we’ll be using a workaround based on Highlight.js, here’s how it’s going to
work.

We will be creating multiline code blocks using three backticks and specifying the
syntax highlighting language.

We can do this by including the highlighting programming language reference right

at the beginning of the multiline code block.

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Just like this, for example. Here we are specifying ‘Apache’ as the syntax
highlighting language:

We’ll be “exploiting” some syntax highlighting and using it to our advantage for
coloring some text.

I included most of the colors you’d expect to use below, and tried to show the
differences between various language references.

Limitations to this Text Coloring

Method
There are (unfortunately) limitations to this method. The most common limitation
being, your text has to be connected in one word in some referenced syntax
highlighting languages (not all!).

This means you can’t type: This is a sentence.

You’ll have to type: This_is_a_sentence OR Thisisasentence.

Why is this? Well, since we’re exploiting syntax highlighting to highlight our Discord
messages, we’re basically trying to make the multiline code block think that our
message is literal programming code.

Most of the time the colors we want are contained in variables, which by definition,
can’t contain any spaces.

One place this does work well is in code comments and strings. I tried to include
code comments and strings in each of the colors below as frequently as possible (to
make it easy to type out).

If you look closely, you’ll notice I did include some variables and mentioned that you
can’t have spaces if you choose to use those formatting methods. Even then, this
may still be a perfectly viable method for single words.

Anyways, that’s enough yapping from me — let’s get coloring!

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How to Color Text RED in Discord

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How to Color Text YELLOW in

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Discord

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How to Color Text GREEN in

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Discord

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How to Color Text BLUE-GREEN in

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Discord

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How to Color Text BLUE in Discord

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Color Formatting
Takeaways
Lessons learned and colors mastered.
As you’ve probably noticed, there are limitations to using this
method (such as having to type no spaces for certain colors).
But the most important thing is, we can still color our text relatively
easily!

I’d recommend using the DIFF, BASH, FIX, and CSS highlighting
above (for red, green, yellow, and blue respectively).
Either way, the examples above include several shades of the
primary syntax highlighting colors, and let you experiment with
them in your messages.

Now It's Your Turn

And now the ball is in your court — get out there
and format/color some text!

Don’t forget to bookmark this page as a resource

for future use. Good luck, and have fun!