Janitor AI Text Formatting and Commands (2026): Bold, Italics, Colors, OOC and the / Button
Janitor AI formats text with Markdown: a small set of symbols, such as asterisks and backticks, that the chat turns into italics, bold, lists, quotes and code. There is no formatting toolbar in the chat. You type the symbols yourself, and the bot types them too.
That is the simple part. The search questions around it are less simple, because three different things get mixed together under words like “text commands”:
- Formatting symbols, which change how a message looks.
- Display settings, which change the color and the font of the whole chat.
- Commands, a word people use for two unrelated things: the buttons behind the
/icon, and messages such as “OOC” that are written to the model.
We read Janitor’s formatting guide, its writing guide and its changelog, and we opened the chat page on the website on 5 October 2026 to check the panels as they are today. This page takes the three groups one at a time.
This guide is about text in chats. For the sliders that control the model, see Janitor AI generation settings.
The Short Answer
- Italics, bold, bold italics:
*text*,**text**,***text***. - Text color is a setting, not a symbol. Chat menu, then Customize, then Text settings. Six colors, one for each kind of text.
- Fonts are a setting too. One font and one size for the whole chat.
- The
/button has three commands: Enhance my draft, Write something for me, Summarize this chat. - OOC is not a site feature. It is a message to the model, and Janitor’s help centre recommends a more exact format for it.
- Text streaming is in Customize since June 2026.
- One message can hold 10,240 characters.
Every Format in Janitor’s Guide
Janitor’s help centre has a short article called “Text formatting | Markdown guide”, last updated on 21 February 2026. It shows each format as a picture. This table is the same list in text.
| What you want | What you type | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Italics | *text* | The usual way to write actions and narration |
| Bold | **text** | |
| Bold italics | ***text*** | |
| Bulleted list | - item or * item | Janitor’s guide says both the dash and the asterisk work |
| Section divider | --- or *** | On its own line. Draws a horizontal line |
| Blockquote | > text | An indented block with a bar on the left |
| Inline code | `text` | One backtick on each side |
| Code box | Three backticks, a line break, the text, a line break, three backticks | A separate box in a fixed-width font |
That is the whole list. The guide does not list a symbol for colored text, a different font, hidden text, underlining or text size. If a page promises a “command” for those in chat, it is not from Janitor’s documentation.
Two details are useful.
The guide was written for bot creators. Its opening lines are about character definitions, and its last example is a wall of unformatted character notes next to the same notes with headings and lists. The symbols are the same ones the chat uses. Janitor’s changelog for 18 January 2026 lists “Markdown support” for chats, described as “Better formatting and dialogue parsing in chats”.
A format needs its closing symbol. *she laughs with no second asterisk is not italic. When a reply is cut off in the middle of an action, the last asterisk is missing, and the text after it shows as plain text with a stray symbol. That is a length problem and has nothing to do with formatting. The cause is usually the max tokens setting, which we explain in the generation settings guide.
Dialogue is a format too
There is one format you do not type a symbol for. Janitor’s chat treats text inside quotation marks as dialogue and can show it in its own color. The same January 2026 changelog entry mentions “Dialogue display” and a fix for “Dialogue marking”.
So the common roleplay convention fits the way the chat works:
*She puts the cup down and looks at the door.* "You heard that too, right?"The part in asterisks is shown as italic text. The part in quotation marks is shown as dialogue. Each has its own color setting, which is the next section.
Text Colors: Where They Really Come From
Many people search for a way to write red text, or yellow text, or a gradient, in a Janitor chat. Janitor’s formatting guide has no symbol for it. Color in a Janitor chat is a display setting on your side. It is applied to a kind of text, in every message, and only you see it.
To find it on the website: open a chat, open the chat menu, and choose Customize. On 5 October 2026 the panel had these parts.
| Part of the panel | What is in it |
|---|---|
| Options | Enable autoscroll, Text streaming |
| Background | Background image, Background opacity, Background blur |
| Text settings | A preview line, Font size, Font family, six colors, Reset text settings |
| Themes | Clouds, The Beginning, Pride |
| Save | Changes apply when you press Save |
The six colors are:
| Color setting | What it changes |
|---|---|
| Text color | Plain text |
| Italic text color | Everything between single asterisks |
| Bold text color | Everything between double asterisks |
| Dialogue color | Everything inside quotation marks |
| Code color | Text in backticks |
| Edit text color | The small “edited” label on a message that was edited |
The preview line at the top of Text settings shows one example of each: regular text, italic text, bold text, code, a piece of dialogue in quotation marks and the edited label.
This explains several things at once.
“How do I make one word red?” You can come close. Pick a format you do not use for anything else, for example bold, and set the bold text color to red. Every bold word in the chat is now red. You cannot color one word without that color applying to every word in the same format.
“Why is my italic text grey?” Because that is the default. On an account with untouched settings, italic text in our chat was a muted grey and plain text was white. That is a deliberate choice, since italics usually carry narration. If it is hard to read on your background image, change the italic text color.
“Why does the bot’s text look different for another person?” Because the colors are stored with your settings. The bot does not send colors. It sends plain text with symbols in it.
Janitor added these text settings on 10 October 2025. Its announcement said the new settings “let you change your font, adjust italics, change that purple color that some of you have been complaining about on bright backgrounds”. In January 2026 the changelog listed a refreshed color picker.
Published chats keep their colors
There is one place where your colors are seen by other people. When you publish a chat, Janitor’s announcement of public chats (31 March 2026) says “you can set custom colors, fonts, and background images on your published chat” and that the styling “gets saved with the snapshot so readers see it styled the way you set it up”. Readers get a switch with three modes: the publisher’s theme, their own chat theme, or the default.
Colored and animated text on profiles is CSS
The colored, gradient or moving text you see on some creator profiles and bot pages is a different system. Those pages accept custom CSS and HTML, and Janitor’s help centre has a whole series on it (“A Guide to CSS”, with code collections for text, images, profile cards and more). That code styles a profile page. It is not something you can type into a chat message.
Fonts and Size
Still under Customize, in Text settings:
- Font size: a slider from 8 to 24 pixels. It showed 16 on our account.
- Font family: a list with a default and 16 named fonts.
The fonts on the list on 5 October 2026 were Lexend (labelled “Eye-Friendly”), Arial, Courier New, Georgia, Comic Sans, Impact, Trebuchet MS, Crimson Text, Poppins, Jura, Dancing Script, Berkshire Swash, Rock Salt, VT323 (labelled “Retro”), Press Start 2P (labelled “Pixel”) and Monoton.
The font applies to the chat view as a whole. There is no documented way to put one message, or one character’s lines, in a different font from the rest. If you want a visual difference between speech and narration, use the color settings: dialogue and italics can have different colors even though they share a font.
Reset text settings puts the font and the colors back to the defaults. Nothing in the panel is applied until you press Save.
What Text Streaming Is
Text streaming is the setting that people most often meet by accident. It decides when you see the reply.
- On: the reply fills in piece by piece while the model writes it.
- Off: you see a “replying” state and then the complete reply appears at once. Janitor’s help article says you can still stop the reply at any time, and what was written so far is shown.
The panel adds one line that the help article does not have: turning streaming off “may improve performance”. On an old phone or a very long chat, that is worth trying.
Where it is now. Janitor’s help article on text streaming (last updated 6 September 2025) says the switch is at the bottom of the chat menu. On the website it has moved. The changelog for 4 June 2026 says the Text Streaming setting was moved into the Customize panel, next to a new autoscroll switch, “making it easier to find both chat behavior options in one place”. That is where we found it.
Autoscroll is the companion setting. With it on, the chat follows new text while a reply is being written, but only if you are already at the bottom of the conversation. With it off, the chat stays where you are, so you can read the start of a long reply while the rest arrives. The June changelog said the option would come to the mobile app in a later release.
Streaming has no effect on the quality or the length of the reply. It only changes how the same reply is shown. If a reply stops in the middle of a sentence, look at max tokens and at your provider. Streaming is not the cause.
The / Button: Janitor’s Real Commands
Beside the message box there is a button labelled Commands. Janitor added it on 4 March 2026 under the name “slash commands”: press the / button in the chat input to open the command palette. Two days later the icon changed to a sparkle.
On 5 October 2026 the palette on the website held three commands.
| Command | What it does | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Enhance my draft | Rewrites what you have typed “to sound more natural and in-character” | Changelog, 4 March 2026 |
| Write something for me | Writes a new message for you from the chat context. No draft needed | Changelog, 4 March 2026 |
| Summarize this chat | Listed in the palette. We did not run it | Seen on the site, 5 October 2026 |
The first two come with what the changelog calls a review flow: after the text is generated you can keep it, regenerate it or discard it before anything is sent. So neither command sends a message without you. With a reasoning model, the changelog for 6 March says you see “thinking…” above the input and then “writing…” once the real text starts.
The changelog says the commands are available on both web and mobile.
This is the full list of built-in chat commands. Janitor has no list of typed commands of the kind Discord bots have. If you type /roll or /summary as a message, it is sent to the model as text, and the model will do its best with it, which is a different thing from the site running a command.
Summaries also have their own home in the Chat Memory panel, with a summarize button and a “since last update” option. We cover that panel in Janitor AI chat memory.
OOC: Commands You Write to the Model
“OOC” means out of character. It is a habit from forum roleplay: you mark a line as coming from you, the player, instead of from your character.
On Janitor, OOC is not a feature. No part of the site reads the letters OOC. The message goes to the model like any other message, and the model decides what to do with it. That is why OOC “commands” work on one model and are ignored on another, and why there is no official list of them.
A plain OOC line often works. In a test chat on our account, on Janitor’s free model, a message that began with “OOC:” and asked a question got an answer that also began with “OOC:” and stayed out of the story. But it is not reliable, and the usual failure is a bot that answers in character, as if your character had said the words aloud.
The format Janitor recommends
Janitor’s help centre has a writing guide, “Writing Style & Talking to the Bot”, last updated on 11 August 2026. It suggests what it calls instructional tags in place of a loose OOC note:
task: pause chat|roleplay, answer query(detailed summary(STUFF HERE))The guide explains the two parts. pause chat|roleplay “tells the bot to step out of character mode so it doesn’t answer in-character or react like it’s still inside the story”. answer query(...) “tells it exactly what you want”. The guide compares it to “putting your instruction in a bright yellow folder”.
It gives several examples that you can copy and change:
task: pause chat|roleplay, answer query(detailed summary(relationship between WHOEVER and WHOEVER-TWO))
task: pause chat|roleplay, seamlessly switch scene to: [WHATEVER SHENANIGANS HERE]
task: pause chat|roleplay, answer query(detailed summary(describe current location (format: succinct nested list)))For an instruction that really must not be read as part of the scene, the guide says you can also wrap the line in a system tag, which its chat memory article writes as <system> at the start and </system> at the end. The guide is clear that the tag is not required every time. It marks the line as an instruction. The words pause chat|roleplay are what stop the story.
The guide is honest about the limits: “You don’t have to use this format every time, but it’s a strong support structure.”
What an OOC message can and cannot do
| You want to | Will an OOC message do it? |
|---|---|
| Get a summary of the story so far | Yes. This is the use the help centre describes |
| Ask the bot to change pace, tone or reply length for a while | Often, for a few messages. It fades as the message scrolls out of memory |
| Correct a fact the bot got wrong | Yes, but editing the bot’s message is more reliable |
| Change a site setting, the model, or the memory | No. The model has no access to the site |
| Stop the bot writing for your character | Rarely. See below |
On the last row, Janitor’s own guide says that the popular instructions do not work: “most of the popular ‘do not speak for user’ instructions just don’t work the way people think they do”. Its advice is to give the model a clear narrator role and to write fuller messages yourself, so the model has less of a gap to fill. We go through that in Janitor AI personas.
For anything that should last the whole chat, do not use OOC. An OOC message is one message. It leaves the model’s view like every other message. A lasting rule belongs in the custom prompt or in chat memory, which are sent with every turn.
Does Formatting Change How the Bot Writes?
Yes, in one direction: the bot copies the format it sees.
Janitor’s writing guide says its model “mirrors you”. If you write actions in asterisks and speech in quotation marks, the replies tend to come back the same way. If your messages become short and unformatted, the replies drift that way too. The guide’s advice on formatting is relaxed: quotation marks for dialogue and some spacing help the bot “keep track of what’s going on”, but “focus on consistency more than perfection”.
Three practical consequences:
If the bot dropped the asterisks, look at your own last few messages, and at the bot’s. Once two or three replies in a row have no formatting, the model takes that as the style of the chat. Edit the most recent bot reply so the format is back, and write your next message in the same format. That works better than an instruction.
The first message sets the pattern. A bot whose first message uses italics for narration and quotation marks for speech will usually keep to it. If you make bots, that is where to set the style. See Janitor AI bot creation.
Symbols are text, and text is counted. A status block that is reprinted every turn with dividers, bold labels and code boxes uses part of the context every turn. On the free model the context is about 9,000 tokens, so keep repeated formatting small. For RPG status blocks in particular, see Janitor AI as an RPG.
The 10,240 Character Limit
One message, sent or edited, can be at most 10,240 characters. Janitor’s help centre gives the two errors you may see:
- “An error occurred when editing/sending a message: message must be shorter than or equal to 10240 characters”
- “Your latest message was too large, please delete or edit it and try again”
The help article states it plainly: “10,240 characters is the maximum size JanitorAI supports.” At average English word length that is roughly 1,600 to 1,800 words, which is our estimate and not Janitor’s.
The limit is on one message. It has nothing to do with the length of the chat or with the bot’s memory. If you hit it, split the text into two messages, or move the lasting parts (world rules, a long backstory) to the place made for them: chat memory, your persona, or a lorebook. Formatting symbols count as characters like everything else.
When Formatting Goes Wrong
| What you see | Likely cause | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Asterisks show as symbols, text is not italic | The closing asterisk is missing, or there is a space just inside the asterisks | Edit the message and close the pair. Write *text*, not * text * |
| The rest of a reply is italic | One asterisk was never closed | Edit the reply and add the missing symbol |
| The reply appears all at once after a long wait | Text streaming is off | Customize, Options, Text streaming |
| The chat jumps while you read | Autoscroll is on | Customize, Options, Enable autoscroll |
| Italic or dialogue text is hard to read | Its color is close to your background | Customize, Text settings, change that one color, or raise the background blur |
| Text is too small or too large | Font size | Customize, Text settings, Font size (8 to 24) |
| Reply ends in the middle of a sentence | Max tokens, or the provider stopped | See generation settings |
| Error about 10240 characters | Your message is too long | Shorten it or split it |
| The bot answers an OOC line in character | The model read it as speech | Use the task: format from the OOC section above |
| Everything looks wrong after changing settings | Too many changes at once | Reset text settings, then Save |
If the chat itself will not load or send, that is a different kind of problem. See Janitor AI not working.
Checklist
- Italics
*text*, bold**text**, bold italics***text***. - Lists with
-or*, a divider with---, a quote with>, code with backticks. - Speech in quotation marks gets the dialogue color.
- Colors and fonts: chat menu, Customize, Text settings, then Save.
- Text streaming and autoscroll: Customize, Options.
- Built-in commands: the Commands button beside the message box. Three of them.
- Out of character:
task: pause chat|roleplay, answer query(...). - Lasting rules go in the custom prompt or chat memory, not in an OOC message.
- One message: 10,240 characters at most.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I make text bold or italic on Janitor AI?
Put one asterisk on each side of the text for italics, two for bold and three for bold italics. Janitor’s formatting guide lists these together with lists, section dividers, blockquotes and code. The same symbols work in a chat message and in a character definition.
How do I change the text color on Janitor AI?
Open a chat, open the menu and choose Customize. Under Text settings there are six colors: text, italic text, edit text, bold text, code and dialogue. Each color applies to every message in the chat. Janitor’s formatting guide has no symbol that colors one word or one message.
What are the commands on Janitor AI?
The Commands button beside the message box opens a short palette. On 5 October 2026 it held three commands: Enhance my draft, Write something for me and Summarize this chat. Everything else that people call a command, such as OOC, is ordinary text that you write to the model.
How do I talk out of character (OOC) on Janitor AI?
OOC is not a feature of the site. It is a message that asks the model to step out of the story. Janitor’s help centre recommends a clearer format than a plain OOC note: a line that starts with task: pause chat|roleplay and then says what you want, such as answer query with a detailed summary.
What is text streaming on Janitor AI?
Text streaming decides how a reply appears. With it on, you see the reply fill in as it is written. With it off, the reply appears when it is complete. Since 4 June 2026 the switch is in the Customize panel of a chat on the website, next to the autoscroll switch.
Is there a message length limit on Janitor AI?
Yes. Janitor’s help centre says 10,240 characters is the maximum size of one message. A longer message gives an error that says the message must be shorter than or equal to 10240 characters, and you have to shorten it or split it.
Can I change the font in Janitor AI chats?
Yes. In Customize, under Text settings, there is a font size slider from 8 to 24 pixels and a font family list with a default and 16 named fonts. The choice applies to the whole chat view. Janitor added text settings in October 2025.
Why did the bot stop using asterisks or italics?
Usually because the recent messages stopped showing that format. Janitor’s writing guide says its model mirrors the way you write. If your own messages drop the asterisks, the bot follows. Write a few messages in the format you want, or edit the bot’s last reply so the format is there again.
The Customize panel (options, background, text settings, fonts, colors and themes) and the Commands palette were read on Janitor AI’s website on a free account on 5 October 2026. Nothing was saved or changed, and no command was run. The list of formats is from Janitor’s help centre article “Text formatting | Markdown guide” (updated 21 February 2026). The out-of-character format and the quotations about mirroring are from “Writing Style & Talking to the Bot” (updated 11 August 2026). The text streaming description is from the help centre FAQ (updated 6 September 2025) and the changelog entry of 4 June 2026. The message limit is from the help centre’s error article. Dated changes are from Janitor’s changelog and announcements. The mobile app was not tested. The word estimate for the message limit and the workaround for coloring one format are ours.
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