How to Bold & Italicize Things on Facebook

If you've seen your friends on Facebook posting messages to their timelines with bold or italic font, you may have found yourself confused. There's no option in Facebook for bold text, nor is there one for the fancy stylized text that people like to add to their public posts. This is true – Facebook does not allow you to format text in the message box when you make a post to your timeline. However, you can still use italics, bold and other specially formatted text in those posts with the help of a secondary tool.

Though Facebook allows you to make the posts on your timeline pop by placing text on colorful backgrounds or by including photos, videos, links, GIFs or other media, no options exist in the "Write Post" box to format your text as you would in a word processor. This doesn't mean that Facebook doesn't support formatted text, only that it lacks the option to format text while making posts.

When Facebook users use bold italics in their posts, they aren't using an extra app or a secret menu, they're simply pasting text converted into pre-formatted Unicode characters. Unicode is the standard language for digital text. Nearly every modern website and device that displays text on a screen today uses Unicode characters to ensure that text will always be visible regardless of the language a given user writes and reads in. Because Facebook uses Unicode text, users are able to paste pre-formatted text into the box to add the effects to their posts.

Though using Unicode sounds complicated, it's incredibly easy. To add bold or italicized text to your Facebook posts, you'll need to use a Facebook Unicode generator like YayText – but a Google search will present hundreds of other options. With the generator open in a browser, simply type out your message or the words you want to format, then click or tap the "Convert Text" button (or its equivalent). You'll then be able to copy and paste the text into Facebook's "Write Post" box to further personalize your posts.

If you want to format text sent in Facebook messages, either on the desktop site or through the Messenger app, you won't need to use a Unicode generator. Instead, text can be formatted by inserting specific characters before and after the text you wish to format. For example, placing an underscore (_) before and after text will italicize it, whereas placing asterisks (*) around the text will bold it. You can also strike through text in the same manner by placing tildes (~) around your text.