How To Format Text On Reddit? [Basic & Advanced Options]

Format Text On Reddit

Today we will talk about how to format text on Reddit. If you are a regular and active Reddit user, you might have noticed that people use various formatting options in their posts.

Reddit is one of the largest social platforms which has millions of active users, thousands of subreddits, and the largest discussion board online. Though this app only allows you to use text in the body and comments on a post, it also has several options that let you format your posts, rather, your texts.

Yes, it is possible to format text on Reddit. The procedure to do so is going to be mentioned here.

Options To Format Text On Reddit

Markdown is a markup language that helps you to format text on Reddit. There are multiple text formatting languages available, but Markdown is the most admired among them. Being straightforward, easy to use, intuitive for the new users; Markdown has gained a reputation among the users and it is well known.

But if you are using Reddit’s new interface on desktop, you don’t need to use Markdown. Because the interface itself has a visual editor. On the other hand, you will need Markdown if you are using the old Reddit or the Reddit app on mobile.

Basic Formatting Options

Some of the basic yet simple formatting options on Reddit are being discussed below.

1. Emphasis

It is a method to emphasize the parts of a text. You can use a single ‘*‘ to italicize a part of the text, two ‘**‘ to make the text bold, or three ‘***‘ to make the text both bold and italicized. You can even add a line through the text. For that, you have to use two ‘~’ before and after the text like this (~~text~~).

2. Sections and Headers

The actual size of the fonts varies from browser to browser. This is actually intended to separate the sections of a text post on Reddit and mostly comes to use if the text post is too lengthy, like a guide or a timeline post. The largest size it has is Header 1, and then Header 2 and Header 3.

3. In-Line Links and Automatic Links

If you want to create a link in your text, wrap the text using brackets like this ‘[text]‘, and place the link right away in parentheses. The links must include ‘http’ or ‘https’ or similar link schemes.

In fact, you can also let Reddit create your links automatically. For this, type ‘u/‘ followed by the name of a Reddit user, and the user will be linked with that name on the text. Or, type ‘r/‘ followed by the name of a subreddit, and a link with the community will be created in the text.

Though these two methods are a bit sensitive, so make sure that you are typing the correct names and also in the lowercase.

4. Quotes and Code

If you are quoting a text from another user or any other sources, in that case you need to put a ‘>‘ before the text. And to add nested quotes within that quote, use ‘>>‘ before the text.

But if you want a text to turn into a code, put (`) on the front and end of the text.

5. Line Breaks and Lines

If you want line brakes, lines, dividers in your article then here are the ways to do so.

Single line breaks are basically formed by four spaces like this (    ).

Whereas the double line breaks or the paragraph breaks are made up of two spaces. You need to press the Enter key two times for this.

And to get the line divider you need to use three asterisks ‘***‘. This creates a horizontal line which is known as a line divider.

Advanced Formatting Options

Some out-of-the-box methods are also available to format text on Reddit. And those are going to be discussed here.

1. Lists

If you want to create an unordered list within your text, place asterisks ‘*‘, plus signs ‘+‘, or minus signs ‘‘ before each item that is in the list.

Add a line break between each of the items. In the case of numbered lists, put a number and then put a period before each of them like this ( 1. , 2. ). This will make the items start from 1 considering the items allocated to the numbers.

You cannot create a list in non-ascending order. All the lists you create will automatically be formatted to start from number one.

2. Spoilers

At certain times you might want to hide a particular set of texts, in case you don’t want to spoil the twist of a movie or book. Here you can use the spoiler tags.

For this, you need to wrap the text in ‘>! text !<‘ format. This will hide that part of the text, and readers will not see that part of the text unless they click on it.

Conclusion

So, these are the simple yet effective methods to format text on Reddit. You can easily perform them and format your texts. But if you feel like going for a preview of the text, you can go for a Markdown preview editor to make sure that your text is fine.

When was Reddit founded?

Reddit was founded on 23 June 2005.

When did Reddit become popular?

Reddit became popular after February 2011 as it reached 1 billion page views per month.

Is Reddit safe?

Yes, Reddit is safe to use.