If you go on Discord, your messages will probably look generic relative to everyon else, who is probably more skilled than you.

Discord Uses Markdown

If you have used Markdown in the past, then Discord’s text formatting should be very straightforward. Various other websites, including Reddit and Github, use Markdown formatting. While there is no official standard for everything that can be done in Markdown, the concepts are very similar between platforms.

Basic Formatting: Bold, Italics, Underline, and Strikethrough

As they say, text formatting in Discord is sexy! Let me spoon-feed you my man:

• Italics                  *italics* or _italics_
• Bold                     **bold**
• Bold Italics             ***bold italics***
• Underline                __underline__
• Underline italics        __*underline italics*__
• Underline bold           __**underline bold**__
• Underline bold italics   __***underline bold italics***__
• Strikethrough            ~~Strikethrough~~
• Spoiler Text             || Spoiler Text ||

Source: https://support.discordapp.com/hc/en-us/articles/210298617-Markdown-Text-101

This syntax is fairly standard for sites that use Markdown.

Escape Characters

If you want to write text that isn’t rendered by Discord, then you can use the backslash (\) as an escape character. This is fairly self explanatory. While *this* would normally be italic, \*this\* will render as the literal text “this” with no text styling.

Code Blocks

Discord supports both mutl-line and single-line code blocks using the backtick character:

`This is a single line code block`

```This is a 
multi-line code block```

These allow for text to be preformatted and displayed using monospace characters.

Discord Uses Highlight.js

On top of Markdown, Discord also provides syntax highlighting via a JavaScript library called highlight.js. Specifically, Discord uses the solarized Dark theme. If you want in-depth information about how exactly the syntax highlighting works, you can look into Highlight.js, since it is the exact library used by Discord.

Basic Syntax Highlighting

To use coloring, first consider what syntax highlighting even is. In programming languages, there are various keywords and symbols that mean particular things. These are generally highlighted in different colors. The code blocks in Discord are technically meant for coloring code, but they can also be used to make arbitrary colors.

When using the triple backticks to create multi-line code blocks, you can also specify what (programming/computer) language to use for the syntax highlighting using the following syntax:

```language_name
Here is some text.
Here is more text.```

Coloring in Discord

The colors used in Discord are done using what are essentially hacks/exploits of the basic Highlight.js library.

Specifying the language as diff, fix, css, bash, ini, json, apache, and other languages allows for some coloration tricks. For example, orange and yellow-green text are both easily able to be rendered. Cyan/light-blue can also be done relatively easily.

Orange/Orange-Yellow

```fix
Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text
of the printing and typesetting industry.```

Green/Yellow-Green

```css
Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text
of the printing and typesetting industry.```

Cyan/Light-Blue

```bash
"Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text
of the printing and typesetting industry."```

Other Colors

Other colors are also possible if you’re willing to do things like wrap your text in brackets or only use underscores instead of spaces. If you mess around with Discord, you can probably turn up some other options, like the ones shown in this wiki or in this blog post.

Markdown Within Code Blocks

You can use the abbreviation “md” to render a code block that uses markdown. This will both keep in the literal characters while also applying the styles. For example *this* will be bold and the asterisks will still be shown.

```md
# Lorum Ipsum
Lorem Ipsum is *simply dummy text*
of the printing **and** typesetting industry.```

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