Telegram Text Formatting: Tips, Font Tricks, and Shortcuts

Plain text is simply not enough. Sometimes, you need to put emphasis on a certain word or prioritize one idea over another, and that’s when Telegram text formatting comes in handy. Make your messages and posts more readable and expressive — here’s how.

Overview of Telegram text formatting options

Telegram has a few basic built-in formatting options that aren’t exactly easy to find. Also, there are simple shortcuts to make your message look the way you intend.

First, let’s see what’s available:

There are five different Telegram font styles — bold, italic, strikethrough, underline, and monospace. Also, there is an option of adding a hyperlink. You can’t change the font itself, only its style. Because many people don’t know about these formatting options or use them only sporadically, there is a chance for you to make your messages stand out.

Telegram formatting helps you highlight keywords and set off commands or quotations:

Now, we’ll show you how formatting text in Telegram works.

How to format text in Telegram

Let’s go through all of the essential Telegram font tricks, one method at a time.

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The built-in Telegram panel

This is the easiest way to play with your Telegram font style, and it works on both desktop and mobile.

To access the panel, select the text you want to format. Then, click on the three-dot menu in the top right corner if you use Android. In iOS, right-click the text and choose “B/U.” And in the desktop version, right-click the text and choose “Formatting.”

After that, you’ll be able to change the style of your selected text or turn it into a hyperlink. Also, nothing is stopping you from combining different font styles.

Hotkeys for Telegram formatting

These simple hotkeys will help you make your text look more professional in no time. They are not Telegram-specific — you can use most of them in other programs and apps when working with text.

Here’s the list of options you have:

• to make your Telegram text bold, select the text and press Ctrl (Cmd) + B on your keyboard;
• to use italics in Telegram, select the text and press Ctrl (Cmd) + I;
• to apply Telegram strikethrough text formatting, select the text and press Ctrl (Cmd) + Shift + X;
• to underline your text, select it and press Ctrl (Cmd) + U;
• to make your Telegram font monospaced, select the text and press Ctrl (Cmd) + Shift + M.

You can also add a link using hotkeys — select the text and press Ctrl (Cmd) + K.

When inserting a hyperlink, you can remove the preview to give your message a cleaner look before sending it.

Special characters for formatting text in Telegram

Using special characters is a less obvious way to change your Telegram font style, but it’s still more convenient than going the extra mile and copy-pasting a text from another app.

Insert special characters when you write your message, and it’ll be formatted automatically when you send it:

• enclose your text in double asterisks to make it bold: **text** → text
• enclose your text in double underscore symbols to make it italic: __text__ → text
• enclose your text in triple backquote symbols to make it monospaced: “`text“` → text

Here’s how your Telegram text becomes bold:

Advanced way to share formulas and pieces of code on Telegram

Monospaced text is great for highlighting a piece of code, number, address, or a formula in your text. But did you know that it’s also easier to copy? Thanks to another Telegram feature, you can click on any monospaced text, and it’ll be immediately copied to your clipboard. Use this formatting option to share important data with your subscribers faster.

How to do Telegram formatting in the web version

If other options aren’t available, your last resort is to use Telegram Markdown — it’s a third-party bot that allows you to turn a “raw” text with HTML tags into a nice formatted text, which you can just copy. No worries, you won’t need to code anything. It works like this:

Remember that you always need to use an opening and a closing tag with your text in between, just like in our examples. Here are the most useful HTML tags for Telegram text formatting in Markdown:

• your text — bold;
• your text — italics;
• your text — underlined;
• your text — strikethrough.

And here’s the result you get:

Is it the most convenient way? Probably, not. But it’s a simple alternative if, for some reason, you can’t use the methods we’ve described earlier. With the help of this bot, you can format big paragraphs of text by simply adding the right HTML tags where you want them to be.

One more thing

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