Styling Your Game with Roblox Rich Text Markup

If you've been searching for a solid roblox rich text markup guide, you've probably realized that plain, unformatted text makes your UI look a bit unfinished. Let's be real—standard white TextLabels are fine for a prototype, but if you want your game to feel professional or even just have a bit of personality, you need to know how to spice things up. Roblox gives us a pretty powerful way to do this through rich text, which essentially lets you use XML-like tags to change the look of specific words or characters within a single string.

Before you start typing out tags like a madman, there is one thing you absolutely have to do: check the RichText checkbox in the Properties window of your TextLabel, TextButton, or TextBox. If you don't toggle that on, Roblox will just display your tags literally, and your players will be stuck staring at a bunch of  mess instead of the cool red text you intended.

The Absolute Basics: Bold, Italics, and More

Let's start with the stuff you'll use most often. These are the simple tags that work exactly like they do in most other places on the web. They're great for emphasizing words in a dialogue box or making a "Sale" sign pop in a shop UI.

Bold: Use  and . This is perfect for names or important items.
Italics: Use  and . Great for internal thoughts or flavor text.
Underline: Use  and . Use this sparingly, as it can sometimes make text look a bit cluttered.
~~Strikethrough:~~ Use <s> and </s>. This is funny for "discounted" prices or when a character changes their mind mid-sentence.

The best part? You can stack these. If you want something to be bold and underlined, you just wrap it in both: Important Text. Just make sure you close them in the right order—think of it like layers of an onion.

Playing with Colors and Sizes

This is where the real fun starts. The  tag is the heavyweight champion of any roblox rich text markup guide. It allows you to change the color, the size, and even the specific font face of a snippet of text without having to create multiple TextLabels and line them up manually.

For colors, you can use either hex codes or RGB values. Hex codes are usually easier if you're pulling a palette from a site like Adobe Color. It looks like this: Orange Text. If you prefer RGB, you'd write it as . Both do the same thing, so just pick whichever one fits your workflow.

Sizing is just as straightforward. If your base text size is 20, but you want one specific word to be huge, you can do: Huge!. This is super useful for "Critical Hit" indicators or making the first letter of a paragraph look like a fancy drop cap.

Adding Style with Stroke and Transparency

Sometimes, your text is hard to read because the background of your game is too busy. That's where the <stroke> tag comes in. It adds an outline around your letters, which is a total lifesaver for readability.

A basic stroke looks like this: <stroke color="#000000" thickness="2">Outlined Text</stroke>. You can change the thickness to make it subtle or really chunky. There's also an attribute called joins that determines if the corners of the outline are mitered (sharp), round, or bevelled. If you're going for a cartoonish look, round joins are usually the way to go.

Transparency is another cool one. If you want a piece of text to look "ghostly" or like it's fading out, you can use the  attribute. This ranges from 0 (fully visible) to 1 (completely invisible). It's a lot smoother than trying to tween the transparency of an entire object when you only want to hide a part of the message.

Why Nesting and Order Matter

One thing that trips up a lot of developers is how to properly "nest" these tags. As I mentioned earlier, you need to close your tags in the reverse order that you opened them.

Correct: Hello! Incorrect: Hello!

Roblox is usually pretty forgiving, but if you start getting complex with strokes inside of font tags inside of bold tags, things can break. If your text suddenly disappears or the formatting stops halfway through, the first thing you should check is your closing tags.

Also, keep an eye on your quotation marks. If you're setting the text via a script, you have to be careful. In Luau, if you use double quotes for your string, you should use single quotes for the attributes inside the tags, or vice versa. For example: label.Text = "Red Text" is much easier than trying to escape double quotes with backslashes.

Using Rich Text in Scripts

Speaking of scripts, you probably won't just be typing this into the Properties window all day. You'll likely be generating text dynamically. Maybe you want a player's name to appear in their team color in a chat log.

You can use string.format() to make your life a whole lot easier. Instead of doing a bunch of messy string concatenations with .., try something like this:

local coloredName = string.format("%s", "FF0000", player.Name)

This keeps your code clean and makes it way easier to swap out colors or sizes on the fly. It's especially handy for RPGs where you might have different colors for different types of loot (common, rare, legendary).

Handling Special Characters

If you're writing a roblox rich text markup guide for your own team, don't forget about "escaped" characters. Since rich text uses < and > to define tags, what happens if you actually want to show a "less than" sign in your game?

If you just type <, Roblox might think you're starting a tag and get confused. To fix this, you use predefined entities: - For < use < - For > use > - For & use & - For " use " - For ' use '

It's a bit of a pain to type, but it's the only way to ensure your math equations or UI symbols don't break the rendering engine.

Best Practices for Better UI

Just because you can use every color in the rainbow doesn't mean you should. A common mistake is going overboard with rich text. If every other word is a different size and color, it becomes a nightmare to read.

Stick to a few key rules: 1. Contrast is King: Don't put dark blue text inside a dark grey stroke on a black background. Use high-contrast combinations. 2. Consistency: Use the same color for "Gold" throughout your whole game. If it's yellow in one menu and orange in another, it confuses the player. 3. Don't Over-Stroke: A thick stroke is great for titles, but for long paragraphs of dialogue, it can make the letters bleed together. Keep it thin (1 or 2) for body text. 4. Font Faces: Roblox lets you change the font face within a tag using . This is great for making a "mysterious" letter look like handwriting while the rest of the UI stays clean and modern.

Wrapping Things Up

Mastering the roblox rich text markup guide basics is one of those small skills that has a huge impact on the final "feel" of your project. It's the difference between a UI that looks like a default template and one that feels like a polished, cohesive experience.

Whether you're just bolding a few keywords in a tutorial or building a complex, multi-colored combat log, these tags give you the flexibility you need without the headache of managing dozens of different TextLabel objects. So go ahead, open up your project, toggle that RichText property, and start experimenting. Your players (and your UI layout) will thank you.