LinkedIn text formatter: bold, italic and lists for your posts

How to bold text in LinkedIn posts

1. Type or paste your post into the box. Line breaks and blank lines stay as you wrote them.
2. Select the words you want to style. With nothing selected, a button applies to the whole post, so select first.
3. Press Bold, Italic or Bold italic. Ctrl+B and Ctrl+I (Cmd on a Mac) work inside the box. Undo reverses the last change, and Clear formatting turns styled letters back into plain ones.
4. For a list, put one item on each line and press Bullet list or Numbered list. Press the same button again to remove the markers. Remove extra blank lines keeps one blank line between paragraphs and trims trailing spaces.
5. Check the preview, press Copy post and paste into LinkedIn's post box. Look at the result on your phone before you publish.

Why LinkedIn formatting needs a workaround

LinkedIn's article editor has real bold, italic and list options (LinkedIn Help: Write and publish articles), and the same tool publishes newsletter editions. The Help page for posts lists emoji, photos, polls, documents and scheduling, but no text styling, and we found no LinkedIn Help page that documents bold or italic in a post (checked 19 October 2026). If LinkedIn adds it, use that instead, because it would be real formatting.

Until then, a LinkedIn post formatter swaps ordinary letters for look-alike characters that Unicode defines for mathematics. The post box accepts them as text, so they show up bold or italic. This tool uses the sans-serif sets. How they look depends on the fonts on each device.

What each style is for

There is no underline or strikethrough button on purpose. Those effects add a combining character after every letter, which fonts can draw unevenly, and we could not find a reliable source on how screen readers treat them. Underlined text can also be mistaken for a link.

Accessibility: what you trade for the look

Styled text is a different set of characters that happen to look bold or italic, so it is not formatting. The Unicode Standard says the block these letters come from is meant for mathematical notation and should not be used to style ordinary text (Unicode 16.0, section 22.2). In practice:

• Screen readers disagree: In Adrian Roselli's 2025 tests, JAWS 2025 in Chrome announced each styled letter with its case and style, NVDA 2024.4.2, Narrator and VoiceOver on macOS and iPadOS did not announce the styled text, and TalkBack 15.2 read it as ordinary text. His 2021 tests found VoiceOver on macOS naming each letter as a mathematical sans-serif bold or italic letter and NVDA skipping the text. So a listener may hear nothing, or hear every letter.
• Search may not match: A styled "SaaS" is made of different characters from a plain "SaaS". Unicode compatibility normalization (NFKC) maps them back to plain letters, but we do not know whether LinkedIn applies it, so keep keywords plain.
• Some devices cannot draw them: Where a font lacks these characters, readers can see empty boxes or question marks; Per Axbom reported this on older devices in 2023. The preview here uses your own device's fonts, so it shows what your device draws, not what everyone sees.
• Copies keep the odd characters: Copy a styled post into a document or note and the plain word will not match in find or search there either.

What to do:

• Use styled text sparingly: a few words, never the whole post.
• Leave hashtags, links, @mentions, names, numbers and anything the reader must not miss in plain text. We have not tested how LinkedIn treats styled hashtags or mentions, and plain text is the safe choice.
• Say it in words too. Write "The key point:" instead of relying on bold to carry it.
• Prefer plain structure: short paragraphs, blank lines, bullets and numbers.
• For long pieces where formatting matters, write a LinkedIn article, where bold is real.

Limits

• Length: LinkedIn Help says a post can have up to 3,000 characters. The counter here counts Unicode characters. LinkedIn does not say how it counts emoji or styled letters, which take two UTF-16 units each. The counter shows the UTF-16 length too when it differs, and if you are close to the limit, paste into LinkedIn to check.
• "See more": LinkedIn cuts long posts behind a "see more" link but does not publish where. Published guesses disagree, some in characters and some in lines, and none comes from LinkedIn, so the preview draws no line. Put the point of the post first.
• Which characters change: Only A to Z, a to z and 0 to 9. Accented letters, other alphabets, emoji, punctuation and spaces stay as typed, so "Café" becomes a styled "Caf" followed by a plain "é". The tool lists the letters it left alone.
• The preview is approximate: It is not LinkedIn's rendering, and fonts, line wrapping and the "see more" cut will differ.
• Privacy: Everything runs in your browser. The tool sends your text nowhere and does not save it.