For anyone suffering from this issue, let me try and explain a bit what's going on. I'm going to explain this in a bit of detail, but aimed providing an explanation that hopefully works for users at all technical levels. How text editors work Whenever you have an application that produces styled text (bold, italic, headers, etc), the text editor inserts invisible codes into the text that tell it when to change its appearance and when to stop changing its appearance. This is true of anything that produces styled text, be it Word, Forum software, Layout software, etc. There are two different kinds of styles: Character Styles Paragraph Styles Character styles are for specific spans of words. These are things like bold , italic , underline . They are used for when you want to style jut parts of a paragraph, or specific spans of text across paragraphs. Paragraph styles are higher level, and style everything up until the next hard return character — an entire paragraph from beginning to end. Paragraph styles are used to give a document structure, and contain a bunch of codes for changing size, style, color, etc. The key difference here is that paragraph styles affect the entire paragraph. They don't care about what words are in them. This is why you have to select an entire word to make it bold, but just have to have your cursor in the paragraph line somewhere to style the entire paragraph. Again, this is true of just about every text editing software in the world. In the case of the Roll20 editing bar, everything under that first button on the left, the "Styles" button is a paragraph style, structural and all-encompassing for that line of text. The next 7 or so buttons are character styles: bold, italic, underline, strike through, (a remove styling button), superscript and subscript. What is going on here? There are a couple of things that are causing the issues that folks are seeing. The first is a true bug that Roll20 needs to address, the second is not a bug, but a Bad Practice whose effects seem to be surfacing due to recent changes, still due to the Bug, but it was never properly formatted to begin with. The Bug The Bug is that formatting just part of a paragraph style (specifically Headers 1-4) is causing an odd split in the line, giving the appearance of multiple columns. The Bad Practice The Bad Practice comes from using shift-return in place of return, and trying to treat a paragraph style like a character style. On the surface, it seems like a desirable goal: A user wants larger text for a section, or span of words so they format it with an H3 (for example) paragraph style. then they use shift return and format the rest as "Normal". (Or normal and use a shift return to isolate another section for changing the formatting from Normal to H1. Or they just want to use shift return to remove the vertical spacing that the text engine places between paragraphs. The problem with this is that shift-return doesn't end a paragraph (and hence the paragraph style). It just tells the text editor to start a new line within the same paragraph. This is called a Line Feed, as opposed to a Paragraph Return). These are also sometimes called soft and hard returns. So the paragraph style never truly ends, and you get that same multi-column formatting issue that you get from the Bug. Subsequent editing to try to fix can jumble up those invisible codes even further, making it more and more difficult to fix. Either of these problems can be exacerbated by pasting formatted text into a handout from another editor (like Word, chatGPT or other styled text creator). Odds are they use the codes slightly differently, or in the case of something like Word, contain a host of word-specific codes that make the styling problem even more difficult to unravel. So, what can be done? Well, the commands given in the announcement thread should fix most instances . In cases where attempts have been made to fix this already, there may be a lot of confusion and/or duplication in the invisible formatting codes. The safest thing to do in those complex cases is to start over, or select a span of text from between two new, simple hard paragraph returns (not shift-returns) and remove all formatting. Hit the "Normal" style, and the remove formatting button. For good measure, make sure that you change every line feed to a paragraph return (backspace between to lines to join them and then hit a normal return character). If this formatting is just too damaged, it's probably a good idea to start over in a fresh handout, with no formatting (see below) and format using the tools in the styling bar. Avoid using shift-returns in any place other than between two lines of "Normal" text. The Best Practice for creating handouts is to always begin with raw, unstyled text. If you use an unstyled plain text editor (I believe NotePad for windows? or BBEdit for Mac are examples), you can compose in there, or if you need to move text from one place into Roll20, pass it through a plain text editor to begin with. Alternatively, when you are pasting your external text into a Roll20 handout, use "Shift" when pasting - Cmd/Ctrl-Shift-V. This is pasting without formatting. For a variety of technical reasons, passing through a plain text editor is safer, but pasting without formatting will work in most cases. This ensures that there are no hidden formatting characters in your text, and you can format afterward using Best Practices. And remember the rule of thumb: Only use shift-return (a line feed) in the middle of a paragraph, never to separate paragraphs. The paragraph style won't end and Headers lose their structural value.
