Mac OS X 10.4: TextEdit list may appear to lose content

With Mac OS X 10.4, if you use the List feature in TextEdit to create a list, it's possible that some or all of your list content may disappear after saving and reopening the document. Update to Mac OS X 10.4.1 or later to avoid this issue.

When this happens with Mac OS X 10.4, your list may be truncated or missing. This can happen with rich text documents (those with a .rtf or .rtfd file extension) and certain combinations of lists and font choices.

You can create a TextEdit List by clicking the Lists pop-up menu at the top of a TextEdit document, or from the Format menu, choose Text, then List.

Important: If your TextEdit document list is missing or has been truncated, please note that the content isn't actually gone; it's just not visible to you. However, if you save the document again, the invisible information will indeed be lost.

For example, if you create the following list in a TextEdit document in Mac OS X 10.4...

- first
- second
- third

... then save the document and open it again, you might only see this:

-

The saved document list appears to have been truncated, but it's actually not (unless you save it again—so don't do that!).

The best way to avoid this issue is to not use the TextEdit List feature in Mac OS X 10.4 until you've updated to Mac OS X 10.4.1 or later.

Tip: You can remove all lists from a TextEdit document by choosing Select All from the Edit menu, then selecting None from the Lists pop-up menu. Please note that this doesn't recover lost text, unfortunately.

Again, you can avoid this issue by downloading and installing the Mac OS X 10.4.1 Update, or later, from Apple Downloads.