Solved Notepad wordwrap ?bug? - double spacing

[Lykho]

using Notepad with word-wrap on, everything works fine, until I save the file, after which, if I amend a line and the text adjusts (or I re-size the window, and expect the wrapping to follow suit), it fails to wrap properly--it's as if, saving it, it hasn't remembered that it was only 'wrapped to window' and not actually paragraphed, so I have to click to the end of each broken sentence and backspace to recreate proper word-wrapping...which displays/wraps/etc. just fine and dandy until saving the txt again.

when I copy-paste some lines of text from Notepad into Wordpad, after this wrapping issue has occurred, Wordpad displays the text wrapping in accord with the Wordpad settings, the only bug being that where Notepad had wrapped the lines of text there is now two spaces between the word instead of just the one.

I know this is remarkably trivial, but it has been niggling at me for ages, and I'm just curious how aware of this people are, and how it is regarded (I mean, is this a feature desirable for the way other people tend to use that program?)

 

[fafhrd]

Text editors like Notepad, for the most part understand printing characters and white space, line breaks and carriage returns only, and the concepts of page size, paragraphs and line spacing falls into the realm of word processing, of which Wordpad is a simple example.

If a text document with line breaks is put into a word processor like MS Word, each line break signifies a new paragraph, which can be seen if the non-printing character codes are shown.

If a text document is wrapped by inserting line breaks to fit within a window, and a word processor which automatically inserts an extra line at the end of paragraphs is used to view the text file, it will appear double spaced.

No bug, just a conflict of two different systems.

 

[Lykho]

just to be clear, I'm not talking about 'double-spacing' (paragraph issues), but..two..spaces..between..a..word..like..this..sentence (though only between the words where the wrapping occurred.

edit: I replaced spaces with '..' because the forum automatically corrected two-spaces to one-space.

 

[fafhrd]

I regard Notepad and Wordpad as free tools and as such, limited to function, adequate for what they are supposed to do. You get what you pay for.

Extra spaces are known in the business as "padding", hence Notepad and Wordpad. :roflmao:

 

[Lykho]

I regard Notepad and Wordpad as free tools and as such, limited to function, adequate for what they are supposed to do. You get what you pay for.

my gripe (as with the status-less status bar tray area) is that functions that once existed perfectly well no longer do. I think there's a difference between asking for improvements and asking that they stop ruining good things (a message Facebook have yet to receive).

 

[fafhrd]

It's called getting old - things just don't work as well as you remember they used to. :roflmao:

 

[Lykho]

It's called getting old - things just don't work as well as you remember they used to.

on the contrary, it's a problem of youth!

I miss my old faithful Windows Millennium it couldn't do much, but what it could do it did right, damnit!

 

[fseal]

I havent been able to reproduce the problem. Maybe if you give a step by step for the notepad fail...

I typed in a single line with word wrapping on till it wrapped 3-4 times. Then saved it, then reopened, then resized the window and the word wrapping still worked fine.

It sounds like you're saying that after saving and loading back into notepad, it acts like notepad had inserted a CR at the word wrap point, making one long line into several short ones?

 

[Lykho]

I havent been able to reproduce the problem. Maybe if you give a step by step for the notepad fail...

I typed in a single line with word wrapping on till it wrapped 3-4 times. Then saved it, then reopened, then resized the window and the word wrapping still worked fine.

It sounds like you're saying that after saving and loading back into notepad, it acts like notepad had inserted a CR at the word wrap point, making one long line into several short ones?

aaaaaaaaah. thanks for that.

if you do that again, save it, and then resize, the nuisance will occur.

as you've helped me realize -- if you save, then close, and re-open the file, you are free to resize with proper word-wrapping!

currently I'm not getting the 'word[spacespace]word' problem to occur,


ETA: I wonder if this is a small part of a larger Win 7 problem with refreshing/keeping up-to-date with what's going on. I also notice the nuisance of a Wordpad file continuing to display after it has been closed (until a window opens/is moved over that region), rather than vanishing and displaying whatever was behind it (wallpaper, explorer, whatever).

 

[BaviH]

I noticed this problem in Windows XP Notepad, it looks like it's still in Windows 7 Notepad:

If word wrap is on when you save, Notepad inserts CR CR LF characters at each wrap point in the display window (but not in the saved file).

• This can cause the text cursor to move backwards.
• If you resize the window, Notepad doesn't properly re-wrap the lines.
• If you copy text that includes a CR CR LF wrap point and paste it in another program, strange things can happen. As you noticed, if you paste into WordPad, you get two spaces where the CR CR LF wrap points were in Notepad.

You can turn word wrap off and back on to clear the issue, but Notepad will move the text cursor to the top of the file when you do this. It looks like re-opening the file using File, Open clears the issue the same way, I hadn't thought of that before.

 

[Petes]

I know this is from 2011 but since I've had this problem since XP (that's 2001) or even before (Win98?) I must say this year being 2013 makes not much difference to me.

This problem has annoyed me for a long time, even more how most "Experts" have no clue about it even if it's so obvious to me, since every single time I use Notepad it happens.

It happens because every time I configure a new computer and open Notepad I just choose "Word wrap", that's because I just hate opening text files and having to scroll horizontally to read every single line. Or having to press Enter every time I want a new line when typing. I just press Enter when I want a new paragraph. I believe many people do the same.

I've even had text destroyed from this bug (scrambled source code). Can't reproduce right now.

Now I'm not here just to rant. I just want to recommend an alternative to anyone coming here for a solution which there is NOT, since only Microsoft can fix this 12+ year old bug (oh and also happens in W8.).

The alternative is called Notepad++ It can substitute notepad, it's free, open source and has more features.

 

[ToughDiamond]

I too apologise for posting in an old thread - and it's now much older than it was when the last such "crime" was committed here. I'm not here to rant either, just to add to the known information about this wordwrap issue by warning about a further potential problem it causes that I've just noticed. You never know, it might save somebody a bit of trouble.

Simply stated, the problem is that document searches can be adversely affected by the "bug."

If you have WordWrap turned on in Notepad and then save your document, and then do Find for a string that (in the document) happens to have been "broken" by the word wrapping, then Notepad won't find it. Although WordWrap's apparent line breaks are supposed to be just a display thing and not a real attribute of your content, in some respects they behave as though they are real.

The moral is, don't be too quick to trust the results of Find (or Find And Replace for that matter) if you're doing critical work. The seriousness of this "bug" is that you could be misled into thinking a particular string was absent from a document, or that all instances of it had been replaced. I noticed the problem while writing code - I happened to do a Find And Replace to quickly and easily change some directory pathnames to a different partition. It wasn't an easy error to spot because only a couple of instances of my search string were affected and thus missed, but luckily I noticed it before I'd trustingly moved on to trying out my work. I've often seen NotePad recommended for writing code, but I've never seen anybody warning about that problem.

Thanks for your time. I'll shut up now.