Chrome extension · v1.1.0
Eighteen styles, in a full editor or right inside the Facebook composer — and an honest answer for every language you write in.
𝗪𝗲 𝗷𝘂𝘀𝘁 𝘀𝗵𝗶𝗽𝗽𝗲𝗱 𝘃𝟭.𝟭
Three years of work, and the part I'm proudest of is the part nobody sees.
𝘍𝘶𝘭𝘭 𝘸𝘳𝘪𝘵𝘦-𝘶𝘱 𝘣𝘦𝘭𝘰𝘸 — worth your five minutes.
#buildinpublic @formatly waafaa.com/formatly
Hashtags, mentions and links left alone — styling them stops them working.
Two ways in, one engine
Both surfaces call the same formatting core, so a style behaves identically wherever you reach for it. That was not free: one release shipped two toolbars that disagreed about which glyph meant Bold, and fixing it meant moving the rule above both.
Click the toolbar icon and get a full writing workspace: several drafts open in tabs, styling on any part of any of them, a preview at the size people actually read at, and one-click copy.
Already mid-post on Facebook? Select any text and a small toolbar appears where you selected it. Pick a style, keep typing. You never leave the composer.
www.facebook.com and web.facebook.com, nowhere elseIn the editor, or in the composer you were already using.
Eighteen styles. Each button is rendered in the style it applies.
Ordinary text goes onto the clipboard. Paste it anywhere.
Eighteen styles
Nothing below is an image or a webfont. It is the exact character sequence Formatly would put on your clipboard, drawn by whatever font your device has for it — which is precisely why some of them carry a warning.
Unicode has no small-capital X at all, and small-capital Q is missing from many fonts. Formatly carries that sentence on the style itself, in the picker, rather than only in a help page.
These work by adding a combining mark to each letter, so they are low-risk on Latin, Greek and Cyrillic and destructive everywhere else: on Bengali, Hindi, Arabic, Hebrew, Thai and CJK text the mark breaks the shaping and renders as solid boxes — measured on real devices, not assumed. Formatly does not offer them there.
Formatly labels a style May not display everywhere before you use it, not after someone tells you your post looked like empty boxes. Whether a style renders depends on the reader's device, not on your post.
The differentiator
Most tools in this category mangle non-Latin text or silently drop it. Formatly accepts any writing system, styles what Unicode allows to be styled, and passes the rest through completely unchanged — and it tells you which is which before you copy.
Latin · Greek · numbers
Bangla · Hindi · Arabic · Hebrew · Thai · CJK
Unicode has no styled letterforms for these scripts. There is no bold Bengali codepoint to substitute — no tool can style them, and the ones that claim to are either corrupting your text or stacking marks that render as boxes. Formatly reports the truth: it shows you "Latin 19 styled / Bengali 8 unchanged" and a plain-language line under it, so you know what you are about to post before you post it.
Your emoji stay whole. Your line breaks stay put. Nothing is ever lost — 27 scripts are covered by 97 corpus entries in the test suite, and the codepoint tables are machine-checked against Unicode itself on every build.
Character counting
On X, a styled character counts as two. Most formatters count the letters you can see and let you find out at the post button. Formatly counts the way each platform counts, and shows the whole breakdown when you hover: characters, code points, UTF-16 units, and X's own weighted units.
Choosing a platform sets the counter only — it does not mean Formatly runs on that site. Styled text is ordinary characters, so you write here and paste anywhere. The in-page toolbar is Facebook-only. Platform limits change; treat the numbers as a guide.
Screens
Every shot below is Playwright driving the real dist/ build at 1280×800 —
the same discipline that has now caught three defects a passing test suite did not.
The captures below predate the v0.3.2 colour change, so the interface in them is the
old citron rather than the blue it ships as today.
Private by construction
Your unpublished posts stay on your computer — not because we promise it, but because there is nowhere else for them to go. Formatly has no server, no account system, and makes no network requests of any kind.
Not a policy — a property of the build, checked automatically against the shipped bundles before every release, and checkable by you in half a minute with the Network tab open. There is no server for your writing to reach.
storage, plus two named Facebook hosts. No tabs, no
scripting, no activeTab, no clipboard permission. Formatly
cannot see any other website — the manifest does not let it.
Drafts live in memory and clear when you close the browser. One setting saves them to disk inside your own Chrome profile — the same place Chrome keeps your bookmarks. The setting says so before you turn it on.
407 unit tests at 100% branch coverage on the formatting core, 71 end-to-end tests driving the real built extension, and 27 writing systems checked against a 97-entry corpus. A release that fails any of them does not get packaged.
The automated equivalent runs on every build. This one takes half a minute, runs in your own browser, and needs no trust at all.
What this costs you
Platforms accept plain text only, so Formatly substitutes Unicode characters that look styled. That is the only technique available, and it has real costs. A tool that hides them is selling you a surprise.
Styled text is silent or gibberish to assistive technology. Use it for a headline, not for a whole post. Formatly's first-run card says this before you type a word.
A platform's search indexes the characters, and 𝐁𝐨𝐥𝐝 is not the word "Bold". Styled text will not be found by people looking for it.
Which is why Formatly protects hashtags, mentions, links and email addresses by default when you style a whole post. You can turn each guard off.
Script, Fraktur, Double-struck and Circled depend on the reader having a font for them. Formatly marks each risky style before you use it.
No tool can do real bold on these platforms. A platform that normalises text (NFKC) flattens every styled character back to plain ASCII — so styling can be undone by the receiving end, and Formatly does not claim otherwise.
For now. The editor works for every platform because copied text is just text — but the composer integration exists for two Facebook hosts and nothing else.
Questions
Yes — completely. Free on the Chrome Web Store, with no paid tier, no trial, no upsell and no ads. There is no account to make and nothing to buy.
The editor does, in the sense that matters: styled text is ordinary text, so you write it in Formatly, copy it, and paste it into any platform's composer. The character counter has presets for eight platforms.
The in-page toolbar — the one that appears when you select text without leaving the page — currently works on Facebook only, because each platform's composer needs its own adapter and shipping one that half-works is worse than shipping none.
Because Unicode contains no styled letterforms for those scripts. There is no bold Bengali character to substitute, so no tool on any platform can style them. Anything that claims to is either corrupting your text or stacking combining marks that render as boxes on most devices.
Formatly passes that text through completely unchanged and tells you it did. Underline and Strikethrough are also withheld there for the same measured reason.
Seven of the eighteen are rated low risk by the engine itself — Bold, Italic, Bold Italic, Monospace, Sans, Sans Bold and Fullwidth — and are safe on essentially any modern device. Seven more are font-dependent, and Double-struck and Small Caps are the two rated high. Formatly carries that rating into the picker, before you commit, rather than leaving you to find out from a reader.
No. It reads the text you have actively selected in a composer, at the moment you
click a formatting button, and writes the result back into the same box. It has
no tabs permission, no cookie access, and no ability to reach any
site other than the two Facebook hosts named in its manifest.
No. Formatly makes zero network requests — there is no server to send anything to. Editor text lives in memory and Chrome's in-memory session storage. Drafts stay in memory unless you switch on "Keep drafts after I close the browser", and that switch writes them to your own disk, never off it.
See the privacy policy for the complete account.
No. Formatly can write to the clipboard when you click Copy. It cannot read it, and it holds no clipboard permission that would let it.
They survive intact. Emoji are grapheme clusters and are never split mid-sequence; line breaks are preserved exactly. Both are covered by the test corpus rather than by hope.
Install
Formatly is free — no account, no trial, no paid tier, and nothing to upgrade to. Chrome installs it in one click and keeps it updated from then on.
Install Extension — FreeAfter installing, click the Formatly icon in your toolbar to open the editor — or select text in a Facebook composer and the toolbar appears where you selected it.
A composer Formatly did not recognise, a script it handled wrongly, a style your audience saw as boxes. There is no in-app reporting — that would need a network request — so email and GitHub issues are the whole support channel, and both are read.