Bold, italic and bullets that survive the LinkedIn composer. Paste a ChatGPT or Claude draft and the markdown is cleaned, the emphasis kept as Unicode bold, and the counter set to LinkedIn's 3,000-character limit.
LinkedIn posts and comments are plain text: there is no bold button, and formatting pasted from Word or Docs is stripped. The reliable method is Unicode bold and italic — look-alike characters that LinkedIn cannot strip. Paste or type your post above, select the words to emphasise, click B or I, and Copy Result. Dash lists become • bullets, hidden characters are removed, and the counter tracks the 3,000-character limit.
Paste an AI draft and its markdown is cleaned on the way in, or type directly. Keep bold and Keep bullets are already on.
Select a line or phrase and click B, I or the other toolbar styles. Bold markers from ChatGPT (**like this**) are converted automatically.
The counter is set to LinkedIn's 3,000-character limit. Keep the hook inside the first two lines, before the "see more" fold.
Click Copy Result, paste into the LinkedIn composer, and the bold, italics and bullets arrive exactly as shown.
LinkedIn has no bold button for posts or comments, and it strips the bold from anything you paste out of Word or Google Docs. The working method is Unicode bold: a separate set of look-alike characters (𝗯𝗼𝗹𝗱) that LinkedIn treats as ordinary letters and therefore cannot strip. Type or paste your post above, select the words, click B, and Copy Result. The same toolbar gives you italic, bold italic, strikethrough and underline.
3,000 characters for a feed post, counting spaces, line breaks, hashtags and emoji. Comments allow 1,250. The counter under the editor is set to the 3,000 limit on this page and turns red as you approach it. LinkedIn articles and newsletters have far higher limits and their own formatting toolbar, so you do not need Unicode tricks there.
LinkedIn shows roughly the first three lines of a post before folding the rest behind "…see more". That is commonly around 200 characters on desktop and fewer on a phone, but LinkedIn does not publish the number and it shifts with screen width and line breaks. Treat the first two lines as the headline: put the hook there and nothing that depends on the reader having expanded the post.
It can, which is why the advice is to use it sparingly. Some screen readers announce Unicode bold letter by letter or skip them, and LinkedIn's search does not match a bolded word to its plain spelling. Bold a key line or a few labels, keep names, job titles and keywords plain, and never bold a whole post.
Yes, as long as they are real characters rather than list formatting. LinkedIn drops the list styling from pasted rich text and shows ChatGPT's dash lists as plain dashes. With Keep bullets on, this page converts every list marker into a • bullet, with a lighter · for nested items, so the list still reads as a list after the paste.
Comments and the About section, yes — Unicode text is just text, so it renders anywhere LinkedIn accepts typing. The headline also accepts it, but recruiters' search tools and LinkedIn's own filters match plain text, so a bolded headline can make you harder to find. Posts and comments are where it earns its keep.
The LinkedIn composer accepts text, line breaks, emoji, mentions and hashtags, and nothing else. Paste a paragraph with bold words from a document and the words arrive plain. Paste a ChatGPT draft and the bold arrives as **asterisks**, because ChatGPT writes markdown and LinkedIn does not read it. Articles and newsletters have a proper editor with headings and bold; the feed does not, and the feed is where posts live.
The workaround that has survived every redesign is Unicode. The Unicode standard includes whole alphabets of bold, italic and bold-italic letters, originally for mathematics. To LinkedIn they are ordinary characters, so they render in the feed, in comments and in your About section without being touched. This page converts your emphasis into those characters and leaves everything else as plain text. The LinkedIn formatting guide goes deeper into what the platform strips and why.
Most people arrive here with a draft from ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini, and those drafts need four things fixed before they look like a person wrote them. The page handles all four on paste.
**bold** markers become Unicode bold, ## headings become plain lines, link syntax becomes readable text with the address, and dash lists become • bullets.A LinkedIn post can run to 3,000 characters, which is roughly 400 to 500 words, and the counter on this page is set to that limit. The number that matters more is smaller. The feed shows only the opening lines of a post and hides the rest behind “…see more”, and the reader decides whether to click from those lines alone. The cut is commonly around 200 characters on desktop and fewer on a phone, though LinkedIn does not publish it and it moves with screen width. Write the first two lines as a headline, put a line break after them, and keep anything that needs context below the fold.
Because Unicode bold is really a different set of characters, it has costs that ordinary bold does not. Screen readers may announce the letters individually or skip the word. LinkedIn search and the recruiter filters match plain spellings, so a bolded company name or skill is invisible to them. A few older devices render the characters with a fallback font. The practical rule: bold one line or a handful of labels, keep names, numbers, links and keywords plain, and let the structure — short paragraphs, bullets, a clear first line — do most of the work. A post that is half bold reads as shouting and gets no benefit from the contrast.
Bullets. LinkedIn keeps the characters you type, so a •at the start of a line is a bullet that survives. With Keep bullets on, dash and star lists from an AI draft are converted automatically; the toolbar’s list buttons do the same for text you type, with Enter continuing the list.
Line breaks. LinkedIn preserves your line breaks and blank lines, which is why most high-performing posts are written one sentence per line with space between thoughts. Fix spacing in the preferences trims trailing spaces and doubled gaps so the breaks land where you put them.
Hashtags. Three to five relevant hashtags at the end of the post is the usual advice. They count toward the 3,000 characters, and they must be plain text — a bolded hashtag is not a hashtag.
Feed posts and comments are the natural home for this. The About section accepts Unicode too and a bold opening line there reads well. Your headline, experience titles and skills are better left plain: they are what recruiters search, and search does not see through bold. Direct messages render Unicode but rarely need it. Articles and newsletters have a real formatting toolbar, so use that instead of look-alike characters.
The formatting runs in your browser with client-side JavaScript. Your post is never sent to a server, stored or logged. No account, no limits, no watermark.