Guide
Strikethrough and underlined text that survives copy and paste
Most places where people write short texts — social posts, profile bios, comments, chat apps, game names — offer no formatting buttons. Bold, italics and strikethrough from a word processor disappear when pasted. Unicode offers a workaround: combining characters, invisible marks that draw something on top of, through or under the letter before them. Add one after every letter and the text carries its own line wherever it goes.
The ten styles
Strikethrough draws a line through the middle of each letter, which is the classic way to show a correction, a joke or an old price: was 50 now 30. The short stroke is a shorter, lighter line. Slashed text puts a diagonal through each letter. Underline and double underline sit below the letters, and overline above them. The tilde overlay gives a wavy line through the text, “crossed” puts a small x above each letter, double overline adds two lines above, and the arrow style places a small arrow below each letter. All of them are shown at once with your text, each with its own copy button.
Spaces
By default every character, including spaces, gets a mark, so a strikethrough line runs continuously across the gaps between words. Turn on “Leave spaces unmarked” to break the line at each space, which looks cleaner for underlined headings and keeps the line from hanging at the end.
Font and app support
Combining characters are part of Unicode and supported by every modern operating system. How good they look depends on the font: in most fonts the pieces join into a continuous line, while some leave tiny gaps or position underlines slightly differently. A few apps strip combining characters or limit how many can follow a letter. Test the result where you will use it.
Removing the styles
Text copied from somewhere else sometimes comes with these lines attached. Remove mode takes them out. Ordinary accents are recognised and kept, so “café” or “mañana” stays correctly spelled while the extra strike or underline marks disappear.
Accessibility
Screen readers read combining characters in different ways: some ignore them, others announce each one or spell the word letter by letter. Styled text is fine for decoration and humour, but use plain text for anything a reader must understand, such as prices, dates and instructions.
Ideas for using it
Show a crossed-out price next to a sale price, add a self-correcting joke to a post, underline a word in a profile, or mark completed items in a plain-text list. Writers also use strikethrough to show editing in examples.
A worked example
Type “Was $50” and copy the strikethrough row: each character, including the dollar sign and the space, now carries a line, so the old price appears crossed out. Paste it before “now $30” in a post and readers see the discount. If the line looks broken at the space, switch on “Leave spaces unmarked” and copy again. To remove a strikethrough someone else added, paste the text in Remove mode and copy the clean version.
Related tools
Mix in bold, script and bubble letters with the Fancy Text Generator, flip text with Upside Down Text, stack marks wildly with the Zalgo Text Generator or write small capitals with the Small Caps Generator.
Checked against the current version of the Strikethrough Text Generator on .