To put text in bold, italic, and strikethrough in WhatsApp, we will need to put some specific characters before the text we want to change. For example, to put text in bold, we will have to put an asterisk at the beginning and end of a word or phrase. That is how we would see it when writing:
Bold writing
And it will look like this when we send it:
Resulting text with bold letters
To put it in italics, we change the asterisks to underscores, as follows:
Italic writing
And that is what it looks like after sending the message:
Final result with italics
Finally, to put the text in strikethrough we have to put the text between accents (the ~ symbol), like this:
Strikethrough text
That our contact receives like this:
View of the strikethrough text in the chat
This ability to format text has been around for quite some time at WhatsApp and is yet another way to emphasize different tones in the messages we send to our recipients. The characters used to format the text are taken directly from a markup language used in online content editing, known as Markdown.
Although its ultimate aim is to achieve maximum readability and ease of publication, the aim of this language in the publishing world is that writers do not have to raise their hands from the keyboard to format the text, so that they can do it as they go along. And the idea behind the use of this markup in WhatsApp is the same: that you do not have to hide the keyboard and you can highlight different parts of the text as you type. It is very easy to use, as you only need to know a few rules that are easy to memorize.
