Glitch text not working

There are four separate things people mean by broken glitch text, and they have nothing to do with each other. Diagnosing which one you have is most of the work.

By The Glitch Text Generator team · Published 2026-09-08 · Last reviewed 2026-09-08

The one-minute diagnosis

Paste your text into a plain notes app on the same device. That single test splits the problem in two.

If it looks correct there, your text is fine and the destination is doing something to it. If it looks wrong there too, it is a font problem on that device. Everything below follows from that.

Symptom 1: the marks disappeared

You pasted glitched text and plain text arrived. The field sanitized your input, stripping characters outside a set it considers safe.

This is most common in profile fields. Instagram filters Unicode harder in bios and display names than in captions. Roblox filters nearly everything. Many sign-up forms strip anything non-ASCII before saving.

Fix: use a single-mark style. Strikethrough, underline and slashed apply one combining mark per letter, and they slip past filters that remove heavy stacks. Open the one-tap styles inside the generator to get them. If that also fails, the field is on an allowlist and nothing will work.

Symptom 2: the text arrived cut short

You pasted a full phrase and got the first few letters. Nothing filtered it. You went over the character limit.

Every combining mark is a character. A six-letter word at high intensity can cost well over a hundred, which is more than an entire 80-character TikTok bio.

Fix: pick your destination from the dropdown under the output box. The counter tells you whether it fits before you paste. Then either lower the intensity or glitch one word instead of the whole line. The Instagram and TikTok guide has the math worked through with real numbers.

Symptom 3: empty boxes or question marks

Rectangles, question marks or dotted circles instead of marks. The font in use has no glyph for those characters, so the system draws a placeholder.

Two things worth knowing. This is a display problem on that device only, and your text is still correct: someone with better font coverage sees it properly. And it happens more at high intensity, because the generator reaches further into the rarely-supported marks.

Fix: lower the intensity. In a design tool, switch the layer font to Arial, Segoe UI, Helvetica or a Noto Sans face, which have the widest coverage of these characters.

Symptom 4: the field refused to save

An error message, or the save button does nothing. This is different from filtering: the field is running an allowlist and rejecting anything outside it.

The usual suspects are Discord usernames (lowercase letters, numbers, underscores and periods), Roblox usernames (letters, numbers and one underscore), Instagram and TikTok usernames, and most account handles anywhere.

Fix: there is no fix, and no generator gets around it. Use the display name field instead. On Discord that distinction trips up more people than everything else combined, and the Discord guide covers exactly where to paste.

It looks different from the preview

Not a bug. Every operating system draws combining marks with its own engine. iOS packs them tightly, Android spreads them out, Windows sits between, and apps like Instagram render in their own font entirely.

The characters are identical everywhere. The picture is not. At low intensity the difference is invisible, which is another reason light effects are more reliable than heavy ones.

The copy button did nothing

Clipboard access needs a secure connection, and some mobile browsers only allow it in response to a direct tap. If it fails, select the text in the output box by hand and copy it the normal way. The text itself is always correct, whatever the button does.