---
title: Formatting
description: How markdown in your reply becomes Zoom content segments — including what Zoom cannot carry and what is dropped on the way.
---

Zoom Team Chat does not take markdown. A message is a list of segments, each one
a string with an optional bold or italic style, so the adapter converts your
reply into that shape before sending it.

Most of what you write survives. Some of it does not, and the table below is the
honest version.

<FormatPreview />

## What reaches Zoom

| What you write | What Zoom receives |
| --- | --- |
| A paragraph | One segment of plain text |
| A paragraph that is bold end to end | One segment with `style.bold` |
| `**bold**` inside a sentence | The words, with the markers removed and no bold |
| `_italic_` | The words, with the markers removed and no italics |
| `` `code` `` | Kept as written, backticks and all |
| `# Heading` | A bold segment |
| `* item` | A segment starting with `•` |
| A fenced code block | One segment, fences included |
| `~strikethrough~` | **Dropped** — the text does not arrive |
| `__underline__` | **Dropped** — the text does not arrive |
| `[label](https://…)` | **Dropped** — neither label nor URL arrives |
| `:tada:` and other shortcodes | The Unicode emoji |
| An empty message | Nothing is sent; the Zoom API rejects empty messages |

:::warning
Strikethrough, underline, and link text disappear from an outgoing message. Write
a URL as bare text (`https://zoom.us/…`) rather than as a markdown link, and say
"removed" in words rather than striking it through.
:::

Inline bold and italics are read and then flattened: `**Deploy** finished` arrives
as `Deploy finished` with no emphasis. To get a bold line in Zoom, make the whole
paragraph bold:

```ts
await thread.post("**Deploy finished**\n\nShipped api-gateway in 94s.");
```

That sends two segments — a bold one and a plain one.

## Reading an incoming message

The other direction is lossless. Incoming text is parsed with Zoom's own
conventions, which differ from standard markdown in two places:

| Token | Meaning |
| --- | --- |
| `__text__` | Underline, not bold |
| `~text~` | Strikethrough, with a single tilde |

Everything else — `**bold**`, `_italic_`, `` `code` ``, `#` headings, `*` lists —
is standard. `message.text` holds the raw text the user typed, and
`message.formatted` holds the parsed tree.