Telegram Text Formatter

Put two tildes on each side of the words, ~~like this~~, and send. On Telegram Desktop, select the words and press Ctrl+Shift+X (⌘+Shift+X on a Mac); on a phone, select them and pick Strikethrough from the formatting menu. For a name, bio or channel title, copy the Strikethrough line from the Fancy fonts tab — it draws a line through each character, so it works where ~~ does not.

Put two asterisks on each side of the words: **like this**. Or type your message here, press B, and copy it. On desktop, select the words and press Ctrl+B; on a phone, select them and choose Bold from the menu. One asterisk on each side is WhatsApp’s way and does nothing in Telegram.

Put two vertical bars on each side: ||like this||. The words arrive hidden under moving dust and appear when tapped. On desktop the shortcut is Ctrl+Shift+P, and on a phone Spoiler is in the formatting menu. Photos and videos can be hidden the same way: pick Hide with Spoiler in the attach screen before sending.

Italic is two underscores on each side, __like this__. Underline has no symbol at all: select the words and press Ctrl+U on desktop, or choose Underline from the formatting menu on a phone. For a name or bio, the Fancy fonts tab has an underline made of Unicode characters.

Messages can only use Telegram’s own formats — bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, spoiler and monospace. For other looks, the Fancy fonts tab turns your text into Unicode letters like 𝓼𝓬𝓻𝓲𝓹𝓽, 𝔤𝔬𝔱𝔥𝔦𝔠 or 𝕠𝕦𝕥𝕝𝕚𝕟𝕖, which paste into messages, your name, your bio and a channel’s title.

Usually a single symbol instead of a pair of them (*bold* instead of **bold**), a symbol glued to a letter outside it (word**bold**), or one pair stretched across a line break — each line needs its own. Code blocks need their ``` on lines of their own. The preview here draws what Telegram will, so a broken pair shows as plain symbols before you send.

No — those fields keep the symbols as typed. Use the Fancy fonts tab instead: its letters are characters in their own right, so they stay bold or script wherever they are pasted. Each counts as two against the 70-character bio (140 with Premium), and the tab counts them for you. Usernames take only letters, numbers and underscores, so no font works there.

Open the For bots tab, write the message with the same buttons, and copy one of three versions: MarkdownV2 for parse_mode MarkdownV2, HTML for parse_mode HTML, or the plain text with its entities array. MarkdownV2 is the strict one — every . ! - ( ) and the rest outside the formatting needs a backslash, or Telegram answers “can’t parse entities: Character is reserved and must be escaped”. The tab escapes all of it.

On phones, the system font: Roboto on most Android phones and San Francisco on iPhone. Telegram Desktop ships with Open Sans. Monospace text switches to a fixed-width font. To make chat text bigger, go to Settings → Chat Settings → Message Text Size on Android, or Settings → Appearance → Text Size on iPhone.

Paste it into the box and press Copy without symbols — the pairs of asterisks, underscores, tildes, bars and backticks come out and the words stay.