Minecraft – The paragraph symbol to change text color in Minecraft won’t appear

What to use

It is common to use /blockdata for changing placed sign data. So, we will use it for now. The syntax of /blockdata is /blockdata [x] [y] [z] [dataInJSON]. Note that we use JSON formatting for text.

Basic for sign

To input a text with /blockdata, we will use Text1 tag. To write "Hello World" into the first line of the sign, simply just do /blockdata [x] [y] [z] {Text1:"{\"text\":\"Hello World\"}"}. The quotes is there for JSON formatting. If you need multiple line to display, use either Text2, Text3 or Text4.

Coloring

There is a way to change color of the sign using the color sub tag. There is a lot selection of color. Here is all of the available one:

• gold
• red
• dark_red
• yellow
• dark_purple
• light_purple
• aqua
• dark_aqua
• black
• white
• green
• dark_green
• blue
• dark_blue

For writing "Hello World" in aqua, you write

/blockdata [x] [y] [z] {Text1:"{\"text\":\"Hello World\",\"color\":\"aqua\"}"}

into a command block. It will change the sign with the first line saying "Hello World" on aqua.

Bold

For bold text, you use bold sub-tag. This sub-tag is a boolean, meaning the value can be only true or false for example:

/blockdata [x] [y] [z] {Text1:"{\"text\":\"Hello World\",\"bold\":true}"}

will give you a sign with text "Hello World" with bold.

The real answer

Type this into a command block changing [x], [y], and [z] into the coords of the sign:

/blockdata [x] [y] [z] {Text1:"{\"text\":\"Place Block\",\"color\":\"dark_blue\",\"bold\":true}"}

Full list for Raw JSON tags

Syntax for testforblock is:

/testforblock <x> <y> <z> <TileName> [dataValue] [dataTag]

The problem you are having seems to be caused by the fact you've added the word "replace" between the dataValue and dataTag (likely caused by copying and pasting from a setblock command).

Remove the replace, and it should work fine:

/testforblock ~ ~2 ~ minecraft:standing_banner 0 {Base:15,Patterns:[{Pattern:ss,Color:1},{Pattern:tr,Color:4}]}