Keep the words readable
Styled characters can be skipped or announced as symbols by some assistive technology.
- Plain text keeps the meaning intact
- Accents, Arabic, emoji, and flags stay as typed
LinkedIn will let you do this
LinkedIn has no bold or italic, so styled text is built from look-alike characters borrowed from Unicode blocks meant for mathematics. Every profile field accepts them without complaint. Nothing tells you that search reads them as symbols rather than letters, that assistive technology may skip them, or that each one costs two characters against your limit.
Paste the text below to recover plain text, or mark a short span to create emphasis. Everything runs in this browser.
See the field cost
Compare the marked text with the limit for the LinkedIn field you selected.
- Headline, About, post, and comment limits
- Styled letters add two UTF-16 units each
Choose the emphasis
Mark one short span and leave the rest of your text unchanged.
- Markdown and simple HTML forms
- No underline or decorative alphabets
When you might use this
- Updating a LinkedIn headline and checking which words should stay plain.
- Cleaning up an old About section that uses styled Unicode letters.
- Adding a short section heading to a long post without styling every sentence.
- Checking a comment before you paste it into LinkedIn.
- Recovering editable markup from styled text you already have.
Where styled text costs you something
LinkedIn has no bold, so the workaround exists for a reason. What follows is what it costs, so you can decide with the tradeoff in front of you.
Do not style these
Your name, headline, job titles, company names, and skills. These are the fields LinkedIn matches on when someone searches. A styled keyword will not match the plain word a recruiter types, and the same applies to any system reading your profile.
Avoid in running text
Styling whole sentences or paragraphs in a post. Screen readers handle these characters inconsistently. Some announce each one by its Unicode name, some skip them without saying anything, so a listener can lose your argument and never know a sentence went missing.
Defensible in small amounts
A short label or section heading inside a long post, where the surrounding plain text still carries the meaning if the styled part is dropped or shows as empty boxes on an older device. Keep load-bearing words in plain text.
Mark only what you want to emphasise
Put Markdown or the matching HTML tags around a short label or heading. Leave the rest of your text unmarked.
**heading**bold*heading*italic***heading***bold italic<strong>heading</strong>bold<em>heading</em>italic