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Why does my Email/Content say I'm over the character limit?

Understanding the text editor's character limit

This article applies to All editions. 

If you receive an error message stating that your “Email Body must be less than 30,000 characters”  or content “Body must be less than 60,000 characters” but are confident that your character count is under that limit it is likely a result of using copy/paste from another program.

Some word processing programs such as Microsoft Word will include a large number of hidden formatting characters when copying/pasting text. In this case, it may appear that you’ve only got 2000 characters when in reality there are 100,000. 

Thankfully, there are a couple of simple fixes:

  1. Write text in the WYSIWYG

    When creating content, the easiest solution is to use the WYSIWYG built into the Centercode platform. Content and Email Templates can be saved and edited later without being accessible to your testers. This way you’ll be sure that the text and formatting are compatible.
  2. Paste without Formatting

    Using the CTRL+Shift+V shortcut to paste text without formatting will remove all formatting (hidden or not) and allow you to use the WYSIWYG to reintroduce any formatting that you want to keep. 
  3. Use a program that does not add these formatting characters

    Some programs play better than others. The number of hidden characters included can vary from program to program, but options such as Notepad do not have any. Using a program that does not rely on this type of formatting to write a document or copy/paste into one of these programs to remove formatting can help.
  4. Convert to HTML

    Text with formatting can be easily converted to HTML via free online resources. Searching for “Word to HTML conversion” should provide a few possibilities. This option is likely the best of the four as it will generally do a good job of maintaining the formatting applied in the source document while generating brand new HTML code without any hidden characters. This code can be copied into the Source screen of the WYSIWYG in both Content and Email Templates.