Character Cleanup Guide
Ghost Characters And Mojibake: What They Are And How To Remove Them
by LinkTextFix
If you have ever copied text and seen symbols like Ã, Â, or •, you have probably run into mojibake or other hidden copy-paste artifacts. These problems are common when text moves out of PDFs or styled documents and into plain-text fields.
What People Mean By Ghost Characters
Ghost characters are the visible leftovers of formatting or encoding problems that were not obvious in the original document. They can show up as strange punctuation, extra symbols, blank-looking characters that affect spacing, or list markers that no longer behave like bullets.
In normal use, people often call all of these issues "weird copied characters" even though the technical causes can differ.
What Mojibake Means
Mojibake happens when text is decoded with the wrong character encoding. That is why a name, dash, or bullet that should look normal can become a garbled sequence like José or •. The original characters were real, but the receiving app interpreted the bytes incorrectly.
For job-seeker workflows, the exact technical cause matters less than recognizing the symptom quickly and cleaning it before it goes live.
Common Signs
- Bullets become strange symbols
- Names lose accented characters
- Spacing feels uneven for no obvious reason
- Copying from PDF creates corrupted punctuation
Quick Fixes
- Paste into LinkTextFix before using text anywhere
- Review proper names and accented characters manually
- Check bullets — they are the most common failure point
- Submit clean plain text, not the raw copied version
Common Mojibake Sequences And What They Mean
| You See | Should Be | Cause |
|---|---|---|
| • | • (bullet) | UTF-8 bullet read as Latin-1 |
| â€" | — (em dash) | UTF-8 em dash read as Latin-1 |
| é | é (accented e) | UTF-8 Latin char read as Latin-1 |
| � | (original char) | No Unicode mapping in the PDF font |
| fi / fl | fi / fl | Ligature glyph, no separate chars |
Frequently Asked Questions
What are ghost characters in resume text?
Ghost characters are invisible or near-invisible formatting leftovers that remain in text after copying from a PDF or styled document. They include zero-width spaces, hidden Unicode markers, and formatting residue that cause strange spacing, broken layouts, or characters that look blank but affect how ATS systems read the text.
What is mojibake and why does it appear in my resume?
Mojibake is garbled text that appears when a document is encoded in one character set but decoded in another. A bullet point stored as UTF-8 bytes gets read as Latin-1 and produces • instead of •. It commonly appears when copying resume text from PDFs created with custom fonts or non-standard encoding.
How do I remove ghost characters and mojibake from my resume?
Paste your resume text into LinkTextFix. The tool automatically detects and repairs mojibake sequences, removes zero-width and invisible characters, fixes broken bullet points, and normalizes spacing — all in your browser with nothing uploaded or stored.
Do ghost characters affect ATS systems?
Yes. ATS systems parse resume text automatically. Hidden characters, broken encoding, and invisible formatting residue can cause keywords to be misread, bullet points to be skipped, or names and job titles to appear garbled. Cleaning your text before submitting removes these risks.
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