Posts Formatting: Bold, Italic, Underline - bbCode Basics

The most basic & most used text formatting on forum are probably Bold & Italic styles, Underline is less used but it's similar to the two others, that's why I included it in this lesson.

All three are pretty simple to use, let's have a look at the, if you read the Intro, I said this:

bbCode is composed of a number of tags, are composed of square brackets [...] & a code inside (instead of dots) that makes any tag different from others.

The codes that interest us are B for Bold, I for Italic & U for Underline, the tags then are:

[B] - Bold

[I] - Italic

[U] - Underline

let's see another part of bbCode intro

The tags have to wrap your content in order format it, that's why a tag is always inserted twice: in the beginning then in the end of the text you need to format, with a little difference, the tag in the end have to include the character "/" (forward slash)

[...]Your Content[/...]

So, if you want to format a word, phrase, paragraph or a whole article, just wrap it with the desired tag:

[B]Bold[/B] will look: Bold

[I]Italic[/I] will look: Italic

[U]Underline[/U] will look: Underline


Nothing simpler, & in some popular kinds of forums, most of time you don't need to type the tags, only to select your text, click on a button & it's wrapped automatically.

Now a last thing, if you want to add more than one style to your text, simply add more tags, but remember always the tag you open first should be closed last (as explained in detail HERE), you would some times get some unpredictable results ... examples:

Wrong: [B][I]Your Text[/B][/I]

Right: [B][I]Your Text[/I][/B]