Found a new angle on fixing that disappearing text glitch

Had this weird problem last week where text would vanish from the middle of a paragraph in my video captions. No error message, just blank space where words should be. Drove me nuts for an hour. Then I noticed it only happened after I pasted text from a Word doc. Tried pasting into Notepad first to strip the formatting. Worked perfectly. Fixed 9 out of 10 glitch spots in about 2 minutes. Stupid simple trick but nobody told me. Anyone else deal with this or got a better fix?

3 comments

3 Comments

barbara_jenkins669h agoTop Commenter

That Notepad trick is one of those things you learn after it bites you a few times. I run into the same glitch with my own writing, especially when I copy stuff from an old email or a Word file with weird fonts. The hidden formatting codes get tangled up with whatever program you're pasting into and boom, text goes missing. Another thing that helps is if you're in a real bind, try copying the text into a plain text editor on your phone first, then email it to yourself. That strips the junk out just as clean as Notepad does.

lee68911h ago

Had a buddy who fixed the same issue by pasting into Notepad first, worked like a charm for him too.

aaron8805h ago

Oh man, I've been there more times than I care to admit. That Notepad trick saved me when I was copying text from an old email into a form on a website and half of it just disappeared. I actually found out the hard way that even copying from a PDF can leave invisible garbage behind. Then when you paste it somewhere else, it glitches out and you lose chunks of your work. So yeah, I always run it through Notepad first now, even if it seems like overkill.