This short guide will show you how to format the text comments you leave on YouTube videos – using bold, italics and/or strikethrough.
Unlike formatting text in Twitter, it’s actually quite easy to format the text in your YouTube comments. Here’s how –
If you want to make text bold, put an asterisk ( * ) before and after that text.
That means a comment formatted like this: wow that was *great*
Will look like this: wow that was great
To add italics your text, put an underscore ( _ ) before and after the text you want italicized. To strikethrough or “cross out” text, use a dash ( – )
Before:
After:
There is a catch. You can’t put a comma ( , ) directly after the last word you’ve opted to format, or the formatting won’t work. For example, if you were to type:
This *won’t*, work
The word “won’t” will not be bold, but if you remove the comma, it will work:
This won’t work
You can use this video to test out formatting for yourself (I uploaded it, it won’t bother me – and you can listen to my dear friend Hook playing w/ the Allman Brothers Band).
As a tip, use the styling somewhat sparingly. The same way shouldn’t make your comments IN ALL CAPS, don’t make entire comments, especially long ones, in all bold text.
Thank you for help.
When I gave the strategy a go, I noticed that the format delimiters sometimes required extraneous white space next to them to be honoured properly (e.g. “He said _what_?!” just prints out the underscores about the “what” without italicizing it, while “He said _what_ ?!” italicizes the ‘”what” at the cost of unsightly white space separating it from the question mark). I can probably think of a number of English-language teachers who’d storm YouTube with torches and pitchforks for not allowing punctuation to stay BESIDE formatted words without intervening stray characters. How can one work around this issue?