LV 2014 SP1: VI documentation text has weird font and spaces between characters

[Lior.Bilia]

Hello, 

 When pasting text from Acrobat reader DC, The text appears in a sans font, along with spaces between characters and garbage characters at the end of the text block. See the attached picture. Any subsequent text pasted into the documentation text box will have the same issues. Is there a way to fix that?

[RavensFan]

Seems like it is a unicode font.  There every character is represented by two bytes.

You might try sending the text through MS Word or notepad or something.  Do as paste as plain text and hopefully that will help it forget that it is a unicode font and will paste it as a regular font.

[Lior.Bilia]

Hi, I have already tried that (Copied to notepad, made sure it is encoded as 8 bit ASCII and pasted back). The text remains the same. Restarting LabVIEW didn't help either.

[RavensFan]

You'll have to post a copy of the VI and/or the pdf you are copying from so we can see what the characters look like.

[Lior.Bilia]

Thanks for the reply, here is an empty VI showing the same issue, and a PDF file for the source material. 

[RavensFan]

I don't see that string anywhere in that PDF.

I copied another set of text out and pasted it into the VI documentation and it didn't do it.

Here is a way to clean it up.  Copy your documentation text into a control and use search/replace string to replace the null character (\00) with nothing.  Then copy/paste the result back into the VI documentation.

[Lior.Bilia]

Found something even more interesting. I wired a string to the VI's description property, and now the encoding is back to normal (ASCII). Run the attached VI twice. The 1st time, it will show the saved description (Unicode string), the next time it will show the in-memory description (ASCII).

[Lior.Bilia]

Just in case someone else encounters this, here is a code snippet that fixes the issue.

Paste it into your VI, run once, then save the VI.

[RavensFan · Accepted solution]

Simpler