Discord is one of the most popular instant messaging apps, with over 200 million monthly active users as of May 2024. With a scale this big, it’s inevitable that most users will not know some of the technical aspects of Discord, including Discord formatting. Whether you’re a server owner or a regular Discord user, knowing the basics of Discord formatting can help you use the app more effectively.
Discord is a text-chat-focused app at its core, so it’s important to learn how to use text formatting to its fullest. In this guide, we’re going to teach you how you can make text italic in Discord using Discord formatting.
What is Discord Formatting?
As you might know, Discord allows users to use markdown formatting in their messages. This means you can make your text bold, italic, strikethrough, and more. By utilizing this feature, you can make your messages look much better than plain text.
This will be especially useful if you’re a server owner and you want to make your server - and your messages - look good for your users. After all, visuals are one of the most important aspects of a Discord server. Thankfully, it’s really easy to learn and use Discord formatting.
How Can Making Text Italic Help You
As humans, we tend to emphasize parts of our speech, and this applies to digital messaging as well. If you want to emphasize that people shouldn’t judge others who like pineapple on their pizzas, you can use markdown to emphasize parts of your message.
Discord servers are designed to host many members, and you can stand out from the rest by making your text look interesting and more accessible. Since most messages on Discord are just plain texts, your messages will stand out when you italicize or bolden parts of them. Plus, they will be more eye-catching. Let’s see the comparison between a plain text and an italicized text.
How to Italicize Text in Discord
Making parts of your text italics in Discord is extremely simple. In markdown, the most common formatting method is to surround the text with characters - these could be tildes (~), dashes (-), or asterisks (*). In the case of italics, you should surround your text with a single asterisk: *like this*
If you’re on a desktop, there are three ways to make a text italic in Discord, and only one way if you’re on mobile.
The first and easiest way to make a text italic on a desktop is to highlight it and hit the CTRL + I keybind. This is a default Discord keybind and is the same across all platforms (Windows, macOS, and Linux.) Since it’s a stock keybind, it’s impossible to change it.
Using this keybind will surround the text you highlighted with asterisks, and you’ll see that the text in your message box will preview an italicized text. When you send the message, the asterisks will be invisible, and your text will be in italics.
The other quick and easy way to make a part of a text is to use the formatting shortcut popup. You might’ve noticed that when you highlight a text on Discord, a popup with six buttons appears above the text.
There are six buttons in the popup: bold, italic, strikethrough, quote, inline code, and mark text as spoiler. The second button from the left, which is an “I” symbol, will make the highlighted text italic.
Even though the last way to make text italic in Discord is the hardest compared to the other options, it still takes just a few clicks. If you can’t or don’t want to use the popup menu on a desktop or if you’re using mobile - since this is the only way to make the text italic on mobile - you can manually surround the text with asterisks. If you’re on mobile, you might notice that the text won’t preview its italic form when you surround it with asterisks.
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