wordpad saving with notepad

This may be a dumb question but it's been bothering me lately and since Im not all that great with computers I figured I'd ask anyway.

My notepad decided to reformat something a long time ago, which switched it from just plain text with no formating to rich text. No matter how many times I change 'save as' to 'ansi' the formating stays the same, where the columns don't line up and so forth like they have to in things like text pictures.

Using wordpad fixes this problem but when I save something in wordpad, it opens with notepad. I tried 'open with' wordpad but my computer tells me it is not a win32 document (no idea what that is).

Is there anyway to either fix notepad so it switches back to plain text format or wordpad so it can open the documents instead?

 

I'm a little confused because as far as I know, NotePad doesn't have much formatting and doesn't use Rich Text, nor save as Rich Text. Not unless XP or later NotePad versions do. You choose your font and whether it's bold/italics/whatever and that's what the whole lot looks like.

However, it sounds to me like perhaps the font has been changed sometime. Try opening NotePad and setting the Font to Courier New or FixedSys if one of those is there. See if the text picture looks better. Also, check to see if bold or italics is chosen, whilst you're there.

Did you know that some fonts used a fixed area for each character and some don't? So for instance, 'i' will use the same area as 'm' if you use FixedSys. To work properly, text pictures need a fixed font size. If you have Comic Sans MS, that's a good one to use to see what happens if you pick the wrong font. Type a row of ones (11111) and an equal number of fives (55555) such as around 12-15 each on separate rows and change between these fonts.

If this hasn't helped, it may also help to post a screenshot of what the document looks like and the Save As dialog box. To take a screenshot, make sure you can see what you want a picture of and then press the Print Screen button on your keyboard and then open Paint and choose Edit - Paste. If it asks about enlarging the bitmap, say yes. Save as jpg format and put here.

And welcome to Major Geeks!