LinkedIn Text Formatter

Not in a regular post: LinkedIn's post editor offers emoji, media, events, polls, documents and scheduling, but no bold or italic option. You can paste Unicode bold characters instead, which is what this tool makes. LinkedIn articles and newsletters are different: their editor lets you bold or italicise text, add lists and blockquotes.

Unicode has a block called Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols: separate characters for bold, italic, bold italic and monospace letters, made for maths. The tool swaps each ASCII letter (a to z, A to Z) for its look-alike from that block, and bold and monospace also swap the digits 0 to 9; accented letters and other characters stay as they are. Nothing is formatted; the letters themselves are different characters, so they stay styled wherever you paste them, as long as the reader's device has a font that includes them. Strikethrough and underline work differently: they keep your text and add a combining mark (a long stroke or a low line) after each visible character, leaving spaces and line breaks unmarked.

Yes. The Unicode Standard itself says these characters should not be used to style ordinary text. Screen readers often skip them or read each one by name, so a bold word can be silent or sound like a long list of character names, and the styled words will not match searches for the ordinary words. Use formatting sparingly, on a few key words, and keep names, keywords and anything people might search for in plain text.

The styled letters are plain text characters, not formatting, so you can paste them into any LinkedIn text field the same way you paste emoji. Check how they look before you save. In your headline and About section, keep the words you want to be found for in plain text, because the Unicode look-alikes are different characters from the letters people type into a search box.

LinkedIn posts allow up to 3,000 characters. Each bold, italic or monospace letter is one Unicode character, but it sits outside the basic range, so software that counts in UTF-16 (as JavaScript does) counts it as two. Strikethrough and underline add one mark after every character that is not a space, so they nearly double the length of the text they style. LinkedIn does not say how it counts these characters, so leave room if your post is close to the limit.

The live LinkedIn preview is always shown in bold so you can judge the 'see more' fold and overall post layout. You can copy any style from the style list above and paste it into LinkedIn. The preview is only there to help you see how the post length and line breaks will look.