How to format text in description field within issue

Red Team DTC March 26, 2014

Sorry, stupid question. Short summary: can't figure out how to do formatting such as bulleted or numbered lists, bolding, etc inside Description of an Issue in Jira Agile OnDemand. Need help!

Longer background: We are running Jira-Agile with nothing else added on. A year ago we'd used it when it was Greenhopper, and at that time, in the Description field within an issue (and maybe other fields - we'd never tried) you could do things like use asterisk-space ("* ") to prefix a bulleted list, a "# " to trigger a numbered list, two asterisks surrounding a word to make that word bold, etc.

We discontinued our account about 8 months ago, but have now found our way back to Jira-Agile. However, using those old formatting tricks is no longer working. I can't decide whether that capability has been removed, vs. it was something that had been turned on / installed in the past that I'm just not aware of. (I was not the one who did the setup back in the day when it was Greenhopper).

Any help anyone can give re: helping me get that formatting ability turned on is greatly appreciated! Thanks so much.

3 answers

1 accepted

9 votes
Answer accepted
Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
Community Leader
Community Leader
Community Leaders are connectors, ambassadors, and mentors. On the online community, they serve as thought leaders, product experts, and moderators.
March 27, 2014

The fields you are working with are set to render as "plain text".

Go into the project, look for "field configuration" and descend into that. Find the text field(s) that need to be more clever and look to the right for "renderer". Change it to "wiki renderer" and you'll find they display formatted text.

Red Team DTC March 27, 2014

Perfect, we must've found at the same time. Thanks so much!!

Like Milan Ilic likes this
vivek prasad September 27, 2018

Fantastic, thanks a lot (Y)

I fixed it very fast. 

Trupti Kamble October 10, 2018

How we can make description of select list field bold as we can't see "renderer" option.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
Community Leader
Community Leader
Community Leaders are connectors, ambassadors, and mentors. On the online community, they serve as thought leaders, product experts, and moderators.
October 10, 2018

Use html in the description.

1 vote
Andy Nguyen
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
March 27, 2014

Hi,

You may want to check the followings:

  • Renderer Plugin is enabled (Manage Add-ons -> System Add-ons)
  • Description field renderer is Wiki Style Renderer instead of Default Text Renderer

Please refer to https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/AOD/Configuring+Renderers.

Cheers,

Andy

Red Team DTC March 27, 2014

Thanks a ton!!

0 votes
Red Team DTC March 27, 2014

Update: solved this myself, but leaving a fix for anyone who needs it in the future. Long story short, on any field that you want to have this ability, you need to turn on the "Wiki Style Renderer", since the fields otherwise default to plain text.

Here's a link to instructions: https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/Configuring+Renderers

Suggest an answer

Log in or Sign up to answer