How does one output bold text in powershell?

Haroldo Payares Salgado picture Haroldo Payares Salgado · Mar 6, 2020 · Viewed 8.8k times · Source

I got a Powershell script that do some automatic procedures, I use a "Write-Host" at the end of each one of them to tell the technical user that step is finished, but I realize is kind of hard to read and keep track so, ¿Is there a way to output a bold text?

Thank you in advance.

Answer

iRon picture iRon · Mar 6, 2020

Just wording...
Seen from the 'ConvertFrom-MarkDown` cmdlet (included with PowerShell 6 and higher), bold text actually exists:
(Using the default PowerShell color scheme)

('This is **Bold** text' | ConvertFrom-MarkDown -AsVt100EncodedString).VT100EncodedString

enter image description here

But this is not completely fair, as behind the scenes, it is a matter of playing with colors. Knowing that the default foregroundcolor is Gray and White is just a little brigther and therefore looks Bold.
Meaning that the above statement is similar to:

Write-Host 'This is ' -NoNewline; Write-Host -ForegroundColor White 'Bold ' -NoNewline; Write-Host 'Text'