Every place you write text in LimeSurvey — a question, a help description, a welcome or end screen — accepts formatting. It works directly on the canvas: click the text, and a small toolbar appears where you need it.

The toolbar

Click any text on the canvas and a floating toolbar appears above it:

• an alignment menu
• Bold
• Italic
• Link
• a ⋮ button, which holds the rest

The ⋮ menu contains Font size (Small, Medium, Large) and, under Actions, Edit as HTML and Placeholder fields.

Click anywhere outside the question and the card switches to preview, showing you what participants will see. There is no Save button and you don't need one — the Saved at HH:MM indicator in the top right confirms your work is stored.

Two habits worth forming

Paste as plain text. Copying from Word, Google Docs or a web page drags along invisible markup — odd fonts, hard-coded colours, stray spacing that fights your theme. Paste with Ctrl+Shift+V (Cmd+Shift+V on Mac), then format in LimeSurvey. This one habit prevents most "why does this question look different?" problems.

Keep formatting light. Beyond the three font sizes, colour and typeface belong to the theme, not to individual questions. Set them once in Presentation → Theme options — Font colour, Background colour, Question background colour, Theme colour — and every question follows automatically. Text that hard-codes its own styling looks wrong the moment you change theme, and it usually breaks first on a phone.

Edit as HTML

Open ⋮ → Edit as HTML when you need markup the toolbar doesn't produce — a table, a list with specific structure, an image with a proper alt text, or a class your theme styles. What you type is what gets rendered.

A few rules that save time:

• Close every tag. An unclosed <div> can swallow the rest of the page, including the Next button.
• Give images an alt attribute. <img src="chart.png" alt="Bar chart: sales by quarter"> — screen readers read it aloud, and it shows if the image fails to load. Decorative images take an empty alt="" so they're skipped rather than announced. See the accessible surveys article.
• Keep it simple. The survey theme already handles spacing and responsive behaviour. Hand-built layouts are the first thing to break on a phone.

If your HTML disappears after saving, the XSS filter removed it. LimeSurvey strips potentially unsafe markup unless the account is exempt — the switch is Filter HTML for XSS in the security settings, and only an administrator can change it. This is a security feature, not a bug: leave it on and find a safe equivalent for what you were trying to do.

Inserting placeholders

A placeholder is replaced with real content when the survey runs. Open ⋮ → Placeholder fields and pick one:

• Participant email address
• Participant first name
• Participant last name
• Survey ID
• Survey expiration date
• Fields based on previous answers — insert an answer the participant gave earlier in the survey (piping)

You can also type a placeholder directly if you know it, for example {SURVEYNAME}. If one shows up literally in the survey instead of being replaced, check the spelling and the capitals — they are case-sensitive.

The participant fields only have something to fill in when you use a participant list. In an open-link survey they resolve to nothing, so don't write "Hello {FIRSTNAME}" into a survey you are sharing as a plain link.

Where the text goes

Keep the question title to the actual question. Put instructions, definitions and examples in the help description below it. Two reasons: it reads better for participants, and question titles become column labels in your exports and statistics — a title that runs to three sentences makes analysis miserable.

Check it in preview

The editor shows your text; the survey theme shows the result. Click the eye icon next to Activate at the top right to open a live preview and read the question as a participant will see it. Do this on a phone-sized window too — long question titles and wide tables behave differently there.

Good to know

• Email templates save differently. Invitation and reminder emails are edited on their own screen, and that one has a green Save button in the top right. Click it before leaving, or your edits are lost.
• Long lists of answer options are easier to read than long question text. If a question is getting complicated, it is usually two questions.

Going further

The full list of placeholders and expressions: https://www.limesurvey.org/manual/ExpressionScript_-_Presentation