Support for Rich Text Format Prompts in ChatGPT

ChatGPT Feature requests
1

Hi,

Would it be possible to develop support for rich text format prompts in ChatGPT. Currently, ChatGPT only supports plain text prompts, which limits the expressiveness of prompts and the quality of the generated responses.

Adding support for rich text format prompts would allow users to:

  • Format their prompts with different fonts, sizes, and colors to make them more easier to read.
  • Create complex and structured prompts with tables, lists, and other formatting elements.

Here are some examples of how rich text format prompts could be used to improve ChatGPT:

  • A user could create a prompt with a bulleted list of topics to discuss with ChatGPT, which would help to ensure that the conversation stays on track and covers all of the desired topics.
  • A user could create a prompt with a table of data, which ChatGPT could use to generate a summary or analysis of the data.

I believe that adding support for rich text format prompts would be a significant improvement to ChatGPT, and I encourage you to consider this feature request.

1 Like
2

In my option, an editor like this forum has (which uses the same markdown format as ChatGPT will output) would not really improve the AI understanding of the contents except in particular cases where you are telling ChatGPT how to format its output.

It is trained on the language of cleaned-up books and documents, not trained so much on strange characters, so it could decrease the quality.

You can type them directly into the user interface.

A table of basic Markdown formatting as you might use in a web forum or to enhance the understanding of input for ChatGPT:

Name Description Appearance Code
Heading 1 Largest heading, main section titles # Heading 1 # Heading 1
Heading 2 Subsections under Heading 1 ## Heading 2 ## Heading 2
Heading 3 Subsections under Heading 2 ### Heading 3 ### Heading 3
Bold Text Emphasizing or highlighting text Bold Text **Bold Text**
Italic Text Emphasizing or indicating titles Italic Text *Italic Text*
Strikethrough Showing text that should be deleted Strikethrough ~~Strikethrough~~
Bullet List Unordered list of items - Item 1 - Item 1
Numbered List Ordered list of items 1. Item 1 1. Item 1
Hyperlink Creating clickable links Link Text [Link Text](https://example.com)
Image Embedding images ![Alt Text](image.jpg)
Quote Quoting text or excerpts > Quoted text > Quoted text
Code Inline Highlighting inline code code `code`
Code Block Displaying multiline code with syntax highlighting python\nprint("Hello, World!")\n ```python\nprint(“Hello, World!”)\n```

(some have the appearance omitted, as they can’t appear in this forum markdown table, which I indeed instructed ChatGPT to produce by using the table column separators of | pipe characters.)

Code blocks are a backtick character, on the upper left of a computer keyboard.

2 Likes
5

I totally agree there should be easy ways to format prompts with the most basic things like italics, bold, underline etc.

Preserving formatting when pasting information into a prompt would also prevent it from turning into a frustrating, ugly mess.

As GPT-4 was likely trained on ~1T tokens, and knows countless written/coding languages, it’s not going to get tripped up with rich-text or “strange characters.”

If it can reply with bullet points, bold, tables, code, emojis etc, it can understand them. The reasons it uses emphasis on text are similar to why users might want to do the same.

When trying to ingest all the information in the world during training, cleaned data really matters, for inference the main consideration is likely context length. :man_shrugging:

1 Like