How the trick works
Unicode is the standard that gives every character a computer displays its own code, across almost every writing system. Alongside ordinary letters, it includes sets of characters meant for mathematical notation that happen to look like bold, italic, bold italic, script or double-struck versions of the Latin alphabet and digits.
LinkedIn posts and most profile fields have no bold or italic button. A converter works around that by swapping each normal letter for its styled look-alike. Because these are real characters, not formatting, they paste into LinkedIn and display the same on most devices and apps that support them.
The important part: a bold “H” made this way is not an H with formatting on top. It is a different character entirely.
What we found when we tested it
We ran the phrase “Hiring now” through the same conversion code our Bold Text Generator uses, and measured the result. Here is what the script showed:
| Measure | Plain “Hiring now” | Bold version |
|---|---|---|
| Characters you see | 10 | 10 |
| UTF-16 code units | 10 | 19 |
| Code point of the first letter | U+0048 | U+1D407 |
| Converts back to the original text | n/a | Yes |
The second row is the one to notice. Each bold letter takes two UTF-16 code units, while the space stays one. A lot of software measures text length in code units, so a tool that counts that way will report styled text as nearly twice as long. Our Character Counter counts characters the way you see them. We have not confirmed which method LinkedIn uses in every field, so if you style text near a limit, leave room. The limits for each field are on our LinkedIn limits page.
The third row explains the other trade-offs below. Software that is looking for the letter H does not see U+1D407 as an H.
The trade-offs
Screen readers may read styled characters one by one, by their mathematical names, or skip them. For people using assistive technology, a fully styled sentence can become hard or impossible to follow.
Search may not match styled characters to normal letters. A bold keyword in your headline may not be found by someone searching for that word.
Display can fail on older devices or some apps, which show empty boxes instead of letters.
Ground rules
- Style a few words, never whole paragraphs. One bold phrase per section is plenty.
- Keep your name, job title and skills in plain text, so people can find them in search.
- Make sure the sentence still makes sense if the styling is lost.
- Reach for structure first. Line breaks, short paragraphs and simple bullets often do the job with no trade-offs. The Text Formatter helps with both.
- Preview on a phone before you post.
Unicode formatting vs real formatting
Real formatting, like bold in a word processor, is a style applied to normal letters. Unicode formatting replaces the letters themselves. LinkedIn articles have a built-in editor with real bold and italic, so use that there. For posts, comments and your profile, the guide on how to bold text on LinkedIn covers each place step by step, and how to format a LinkedIn post covers layout without styled letters. If you use images in a styled post, add alt text too.