Reddit fonts and text formatting

Reddit posts and comments are written in Markdown, a handful of plain symbols that become formatting when the post is displayed. On the website you can also click the formatting buttons above the text box instead of typing the symbols. Here is what each effect takes, next to the pasted look-alike from the generator.

When both are available, Markdown is the better tool. Under the formatting, the word is still the plain word solved, so search can find it, copying it gives clean text, and a screen reader says it normally. Each look-alike is a string of other characters that only resembles the word.

• Post titles. A title takes no formatting, and asterisks in one show up as typed, so a pasted 𝗯𝗼𝗹𝗱 word is the only way to stress part of it.
• Your display name. Unlike the username, it can be changed whenever you like, and styled letters are accepted.
• User flair, in communities that let members edit it. A styled word can sit beside your name there.

Even there, go lightly. Titles are how people find posts, through Reddit’s search and through search engines, and a title in styled characters may not match the plain words they type. Style one word at most, and never the word someone would search for.

Tip: Many communities ask for titles in a set format, such as a tag in square brackets at the start, and moderators can remove posts that ignore it. Check the community’s rules before you decorate a title.

Markdown sometimes acts on text you meant literally. These are the usual surprises, with the fix for each:

• A line that starts with a year and a full stop, like “1999. Best summer ever”, can turn into a numbered list. Type 1999\. with a backslash before the full stop.
• Asterisks between numbers, as in 2*3*4, can disappear and turn the 3 italic. Write 2\*3\*4 to keep them.
• A line beginning with # and a space becomes a heading, and one beginning with > becomes a quote. A backslash in front keeps the symbol.
• A single line break may be ignored in some views, which runs two lines together. Leave a blank line between paragraphs.

The backslash is Markdown’s escape character: the symbol straight after it is shown exactly as typed, and the backslash itself disappears.

Most Markdown looks the same everywhere, but a few things differ between old.reddit.com, the current website and the Reddit app.

• Code blocks: three backticks above and below a block work on the current site and in the app, but old Reddit doesn’t show them as a block. Indenting every line by four spaces works in all three.
• Superscript: ^word raises a single word; for several words, wrap them as ^(like this).
• Editors: the website’s text box has a rich-text mode with buttons and a Markdown mode where you type the symbols yourself.
• Pasted letters: these look the same in all three, because they’re characters rather than formatting. How they’re drawn depends on the reader’s device fonts.

Strikethrough has a particular job on Reddit: correcting yourself without hiding what you first wrote. People strike the old text and put the fix after it, as in ~~Tuesday~~ Wednesday, or add a line starting “Edit:” to say what changed. Replies that quoted the original still make sense that way.

Use Markdown’s double tildes for this in comments. Unicode strikethrough, which adds a line-drawing mark after every character, as in T̶u̶e̶s̶d̶a̶y̶, is only worth it in a title or a display name. Screen readers may skip those marks or read them out one by one, so a listener could hear the struck word as if it still stood.