LinkedIn post formatter, with the fold drawn live.

LinkedIn's post composer is plain text. Its help page for posts says one thing about a post's shape, that the limit is 3,000 characters, and nothing about bold or italics. The rich-text tools LinkedIn does document, style, bold, italics, lists, blockquotes and dividers, belong to articles, the long-form format with its own editor.

So every bold word you have seen in a feed post is a different set of characters standing in for a formatting LinkedIn never offered. This tool swaps each letter for its look-alike from the Unicode block called Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols, the block every formatter on the web draws from. The letters travel inside the text, which is why they survive copy and paste. The block has capitals and small letters for every style here, and digits only for bold and monospace; a digit in italic stays as typed.

Bold earns its place in three spots. A number the reader should carry away, the figure on its own. The turn of the post, the one line where the story changes direction: "Six months. That is what the hesitation cost." And a label at the start of a list line, so a reader scanning on a phone finds the row they want.

It costs you when it lands on the hook. The first line works because of the words in it; dress it up and it reads as an advert, and the thumb keeps moving. It costs you again when it spreads: a paragraph in bold has no emphasis left, because emphasis is a contrast. Italic is quieter and suits a quoted phrase or an aside. Monospace suits a command or a number read like a receipt. Underline reads as a link; people tap it and nothing happens, so use it rarely.

The look-alike letters are mathematical symbols, and assistive software treats them as such. Per Axbom's account puts it plainly: screen readers "will most often skip them, or read something that sounds very long, as an explanation of each character". A blind reader hears your bold sentence spelled out symbol by symbol, or hears nothing where it was. The same text is invisible to search, as the article notes: a word set in these characters is a different string, and no search box matches it.

Two rules follow. Style a word or a line, never a paragraph, and keep the sentence that carries the point in plain letters: if the one thing you need the reader to keep is in look-alike letters, a screen reader user keeps nothing. And keep a plain copy; the Clean formatting button maps every styled letter back, including text pasted in from other formatters. Older devices can show the letters as empty boxes.

In the feed LinkedIn shows the start of a post and hides the rest behind see more. LinkedIn does not publish where the cut falls, and it moves with the reader's screen width and font size. The card on this page draws the fold the way Sonar's own drafting surfaces draw it: after about 210 characters or 3 line breaks, whichever comes first, snapped back to the last whole word. An estimate that moves.

What matters is what sits above it. The first line and the one after it are the whole post for most readers. Write them so they stand alone, put the line break where you want the eye to stop, and check that the first line does not run past the fold without a break; the counter under the card flags it.

True line breaks are the one kind of formatting LinkedIn keeps. This tool preserves every one you type, and the card shows them. A blank line between paragraphs gives a post air on a phone; a paragraph past 300 characters reads as a wall, and the counter says so. The bullet and arrow buttons put a character at the start of the line, which is all a list on LinkedIn is; press again to take it off. Copy the result, paste it into the composer, and what you pasted is what posts.

Formatting is the last minute of a post. The other forty are finding the thing worth saying and writing it the way you talk; the guide on how to write LinkedIn posts covers that half. Sonar does it from your week: it reads your calendar, meetings and Slack, keeps the moments worth a post, and drafts in your voice, in this same card, with one-tap edits. How Sonar drafts the post for you.