- How does a strikethrough survive a copy-paste when the app has no formatting?
- It isn't formatting. Unicode, the character standard every phone and computer shares, includes a handful of combining overlay marks — a long stroke, a short stroke, a solidus, a tilde. A combining mark isn't a character of its own; it draws on top of the character before it. This tool puts one overlay after every letter, digit, and interior space, so the line is made of characters rather than styling. The app you paste into just stores the characters, the same way it stores an emoji, and the line comes along for the ride.
- Where can I paste crossed-out text?
- Instagram bios, captions, and comments; X posts and display names; Facebook Marketplace, eBay, and Etsy listings; Google Sheets and Excel cells; Discord nicknames; YouTube descriptions; LinkedIn headlines. It won't work in fields that only accept plain letters and numbers, such as Instagram and X usernames, most email addresses, and many sign-up forms. If a field rejects it, that's the field's rule, not a broken copy.
- Should I use this in Discord, Slack, Reddit, or WhatsApp?
- No — those four have real strikethrough built in, and it's better. Wrap the text in double tildes (~~like this~~) in Discord, Slack, and Reddit, or single tildes (~like this~) in WhatsApp. Real strikethrough stays searchable and reads correctly to a screen reader, because the underlying letters are untouched. Use the Unicode version for the places that have no markdown at all: Instagram, marketplace listings, spreadsheet cells, display names.
- Why does my crossed-out text count as twice as many characters?
- Because it is twice as many characters. Each overlay is a separate code point sitting after the letter it strikes, so a 60-character sentence becomes 120. That matters when you're up against a limit: an Instagram bio caps at 150 characters, an X post at 280. Cross out the four characters of a price, not the whole sentence, and you'll stay inside the limit. The counter under the styles shows both numbers as you type so there's no surprise at paste time.
- Why do the four styles look different on my phone than on my laptop?
- The overlay is drawn by the font, and fonts disagree about how long the stroke should be and where it sits. On most systems the long stroke (U+0336) connects letter to letter into one continuous line, which is what people expect from a strikethrough. The short stroke can leave visible gaps in a wide font, the solidus tilts, and the tilde sits high on some Android builds. If one style looks broken where you're pasting, try the next one down — the text is identical apart from the overlay.
- What happens to emoji and accented letters?
- Emoji are left alone on purpose. Overlays on an emoji either render as a stray line next to it or break the emoji into two boxes, so a fire, a flag, or a multi-person family emoji passes through exactly as you typed it. Accented letters do get struck, and the overlay is inserted before the accent so the letter keeps its accent above and takes the stroke through the middle. Cyrillic, Greek, and accented Latin all work, which is unusual for this category of tool — the fancy-font generators can only handle A–Z.
- Can I cross out text that's already crossed out?
- Yes. Paste it in and the tool strips every overlay it finds before applying the one you pick, so you get a clean single line instead of a doubled-up smear. That also makes it an un-strike tool in one step: paste struck text, and the character counter shows the original length back. Copying a different row swaps the style rather than stacking on top of it.
- Is crossed-out text bad for accessibility?
- It has a real cost. Screen readers such as VoiceOver and NVDA read the base letters, but many of them announce the combining mark too, so a listener can hear every letter interrupted by an extra token. A crossed-out price or a single word is a small tax. A crossed-out paragraph can be unlistenable. Search is the other cost: to a search box, struck text and plain text are different strings, so a struck word usually won't be found. Keep your business name, product names, and hashtags plain.
- Why does the trailing space at the end not get a line through it?
- Because a stroke floating past the last letter looks like a mistake. Spaces inside the text are struck, so the line reads as one unbroken rule across a phrase rather than a row of dashes. Whitespace at the very start and end is left bare, and newlines and tabs are never struck, so pasting several lines gives you each line crossed out on its own rather than one stroke smeared across the line break.
- Does anything I type get sent anywhere?
- No. The conversion runs in your browser, in JavaScript, on the text in the box. Nothing is uploaded, stored, or logged, which is also why it still works with the tab offline. That matters more than it sounds for this particular tool — people paste prices, contract terms, and half-finished messages into it.
