Okay, so I opened up the document containing my novel manuscript today to find some really weird stuff going on with the header and footer. The header has been replaced entirely with a bunch of keyboard characters (like, literally square boxes with Tab, Alt, Return, etc in them). The footer isn't quite so bad - it just contained the page numbers previously, and it still has the page numbers, just in the same square boxes as the stuff in the header.

When I saw this, I shrugged, went into an earlier draft, and copied and pasted the old header into the new document - only to find that when I pressed paste, the same bizarre line of keyboard characters (I'm probably using the wrong word, but I really don't know how to better describe this).

Here are some pictures.









(Previously, the header was just right-aligned text with a page number at the end)

Anyone know WTF is going on here? As far as I can recall, I haven't altered the header or footer in ages, nor have I really done anything with the document besides alterations to the text itself, font changes, and copying sections into the body of emails.

I'm using the Windows 10 operating system and Microsoft Word 2013.

Thank you.

Possibly the font or the document itself has become corrupt. If other documents using the same font are affected, delete then reinstall the font.

Corrupt documents can often be 'repaired' by inserting a new, empty, paragraph at the very end, copying everything except that new paragraph to a new document based on the same template (headers & footers may need to be copied separately), closing the old document and saving the new one over it.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Thanks.

I think I've found the culprit, anyway. Turns out the header and footer had both been changed to some bizarre font called SWGamekeys. Deleting it all, changing the font and retyping it seems to have done the trick.

Should this happen again, select all text in your header and footer and change the font. This should recover your text.