Okay all my mac people. Since I got my new machine, whenever I copypaste into TextEdit (default RTF), it looks like this garbage unless I "make plain text". Why? And what can I do about it?

@ceciliatan

#MacOS

No idea, hopefully adding hashtags will spread your question further!

@ceciliatan @podfeet may know! She knows a lot about that stuff.

@ceciliatan This might (possibly) be what you're looking for?

https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/textedit/txted1028/mac

@f Thanks, but not really. If I paste into an RTF and then switch it to plain text, the characters resolve to the text as normal. But why doesn't it work now, when it worked without having to do that for ~20 years? These are just copypaste from simple things like Gmail, which isn't in some fancy font that TextEdit shouldn't recognize or something.

@ceciliatan Only thing I can think of is that the default encoding for TextEdit changed for some reason — maybe an OS update?

So what I was pointing to was the second option on the page which lets you set the default encoding for TextEdit. I was hoping that playing around with it might help you find an encoding where any pasted in text just works.

But on the other hand, it might not be the encoding at all. Unfortunately, it's a little difficult to say without being able to try things out in person ... at least for me 🙂

The other option would be to switch to a plain text editor. Theoretically, when you paste into that, all text should show up as normal but that might not suit your needs.

@f If I can just switch the defaults on textedit to default to plain text, that wouldn't solve the mystery of why it's happening, but would solve the issue... hmmm... (Once in a while when I copypaste it works fine, other times it doesn't. It never works from Gmail anymore, for example, but some other web pages are fine.)