Facebook has no bold button, so styled text is made of Unicode characters you paste in. Style all of your post or just one line of it, see it laid out as a post, and copy it across. Messenger is the exception: it has real formatting, and the shortcuts are below.
Facebook strips formatting out of posts, so there is no bold button to press. What this tool does instead is swap your letters for Unicode characters that were drawn bold or italic to begin with, which means the styling travels inside the text and survives being pasted into a field with no formatting controls at all.
It works anywhere Facebook lets you type: posts, comments, group descriptions, event details and your bio. Page and profile names are the exception, because those are checked against a stricter set of rules.
Use it on the line that needs the emphasis, not the whole post. A paragraph in script is harder to read than plain text, and a feed is somewhere people are already looking for a reason to scroll past.
Everything else here is a workaround. Messenger is not: it reads a small set of markers as you type and turns them into genuine formatting, so you do not need styled characters there at all.
*bold* → bold_italic_ → italic~strikethrough~ → `code` and ```a block``` → monospaceThe markers disappear when the message sends, and the text stays searchable and readable to a screen reader, neither of which is true of the Unicode kind. Use the real thing in Messenger and save this tool for the places Facebook gives you nothing.
One caveat that applies everywhere else: bold, italic, underline and strikethrough render on any device, while script, circled and double-struck depend on the fonts your reader happens to have. That is why the reliable five sit first in the toolbar.
Keyboard shortcuts work too: Ctrl+B for bold, Ctrl+I for italic and Ctrl+U for underline (Cmd on a Mac). You can apply different styles to different parts of the same message, which is how you get a headline that stands out above ordinary, readable body text.
The characters are not Facebook-specific and will paste anywhere, but two platforms have a problem this page does not solve. On LinkedIn the question is not styling but the fold, and the LinkedIn text formatter draws the “see more” line on your post. On Instagram it is blank lines, which get collapsed on posting; the Instagram line break generator fixes that. Caps and cut-offs for every platform are on the character limits page.
The tool does not apply formatting. It swaps your letters for Unicode characters that already look bold or italic, so the styling travels inside the text itself.
No. These are ordinary Unicode characters, the same kind as an emoji or an accented letter, and nothing about them counts as gaming the platform.
Yes, anywhere Facebook lets you type, because the styling is carried by the characters rather than applied on top of them. Account and Page names are the one place it is rejected.
The characters themselves paste anywhere. What differs is what each platform does to your layout afterwards, which is why there is a separate LinkedIn and Instagram tool.
Their device has no font covering those characters, which happens most on older Android phones and Windows installs. Bold, italic, underline and strikethrough are the safe bets, and they sit first in the toolbar for that reason. Script, circled and double-struck are the likeliest to break.
Not by the styled words. To a search engine the bold version of a word is a different string from the plain one, so keep names, brands and the words you want found in ordinary letters.
Yes. Select the part you want back and press Remove formatting, and the characters are mapped to plain letters again. Undo works too, as do the usual keyboard shortcuts.
Screen readers often cannot read these characters properly, and search engines do not treat them as ordinary words. Use them sparingly, and never for a whole message.