How To Highlight Text In Jira

If you use Jira for managing projects or tracking issues, you may frequently need to emphasize certain text to draw attention to its significance. This blog presents a detailed tutorial on how to accomplish this task.

Understanding Jira’s Markup Language

Jira uses its own markup language for formatting text. It’s different from the common ones like HTML or Markdown, but once you get the hang of it, you’ll find it quite straightforward.

Highlighting text in Jira

In Jira, you can highlight text using ‘panel’ macro. To create a colored panel around your text, you need to use the following syntax:

          {panel:title=Panel Title|titleBGColor=HexColorCode|bgColor=HexColorCode}
          Your text here
          {panel}
        

You can replace ‘HexColorCode’ with any valid Hex color code. For example, if you want a panel with a yellow background, you can use ‘#FFFF00’.

Example

Let’s say we want to highlight the text “This is important” with a green background. Here’s how you can do it:

          {panel:title=Important Note|titleBGColor=#008000|bgColor=#90EE90}
          This is important
          {panel}
        

This will produce a green panel with a darker green title bar, and the title ‘Important Note’.

Keep in mind that color highlighting should be used sparingly. Overuse can make your Jira issues hard to read and may distract from the content. But, used judiciously, text highlighting can be a powerful tool for emphasizing important information.

Inline Highlighting

For inline highlighting use ‘strong’ tag or ‘b’ tag. To highlight a specific portion of your text, you can wrap it with * (asterisks). For example, *This text would be bold*.

Conclusion

While Jira doesn’t provide a built-in highlight feature like a word processor, you can still effectively highlight important text using the markup language. Once you understand how to use the panel and strong tags, you’ll be able to make crucial parts of your Jira issues and comments stand out.