Hello,

I work out of .txt files in Notepad and recently moved from a Windows 10 computer to a new one with Windows 11. Text files I’ve had for years with accented letters are now corrupted. Regardless of what character they were, they display in Notepad as boxed question marks. I didn’t notice until after I saved changes. When I open the same file or copy and paste the text elsewhere, the box carries over as a space. Naturally, I can’t search within the file for the character because it pastes in the field as a space.

These characters existed without issue for years in Notepad throughout previous versions of Windows. Because I’d been copying and pasting text into Notepad and saving, I know that some characters, such as in Japanese, Chinese, and Hungarian languages, were too much for the old Notepad to save without changing the default format, which I never did. I preferred to maintain a universal format for the text file for compatibility.

My language setting is and has always been English. I do not need or want to change it.

Opening the same file changing Encoding from Auto-Detect to ANSI or UTF-8 only changes the boxed question mark to a space. I don’t know how Microsoft could get this so wrong after so many decades.

I believe it’s too late to salvage all my accented characters in texts I’ve saved over, but how do I prevent this other than switching to another application?

​Hello, I work out of .txt files in Notepad and recently moved from a Windows 10 computer to a new one with Windows 11. Text files I’ve had for years with accented letters are now corrupted. Regardless of what character they were, they display in Notepad as boxed question marks. I didn’t notice until after I saved changes. When I open the same file or copy and paste the text elsewhere, the box carries over as a space. Naturally, I can’t search within the file for the character because it pastes in the field as a space. These characters existed without issue for years in Notepad throughout previous versions of Windows. Because I’d been copying and pasting text into Notepad and saving, I know that some characters, such as in Japanese, Chinese, and Hungarian languages, were too much for the old Notepad to save without changing the default format, which I never did. I preferred to maintain a universal format for the text file for compatibility. My language setting is and has always been English. I do not need or want to change it. Opening the same file changing Encoding from Auto-Detect to ANSI or UTF-8 only changes the boxed question mark to a space. I don’t know how Microsoft could get this so wrong after so many decades. I believe it’s too late to salvage all my accented characters in texts I’ve saved over, but how do I prevent this other than switching to another application?  Read More

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