[MCPE-230289] Book and Quill Text Formatting Broken - Line Breaks and Alignment and Colored Text Behaving Inconsistently

After updating to 1.21.120 (GDK update) any books written before the update now have broken formatting. Line breaks will randomly shift down or dissapear, some pages have centered or aligned entries ruined by premature wrapping, fixing the issue on one page will almost always cause another page to break, whenever you close the book after seemingly fixing all errors and open it again said glitch will occur again and formatting will be ruined, newly written books (after 1.21.120) seem to be unnafected suggesting only legacy book NBT data is broken by the update.

This is especially frustrating for players in survival/realm worlds who use books for coordinate logs, manuals, farm logs etc, as this corrupts existing documentation and makes critical pages completely unreadable and or sloppy looking.

Steps to reproduce:

Open a book written before updating to 1.21.120.

Flip through the pages, some will have shifted line breaks, cut off lines, or mangled formatting.

Try fixing one page (by retyping or shifting text)

Notice that another previously unbroken page now becomes glitched

Create a brand new book and write the exact same content, the formatting behaves normally.

Linked issues

is duplicated by 13

MCPE-231892 Problem with the Book and Quill Resolved

MCPE-232112 Book & Quills Squishing text on a page and removing coloured text Resolved

MCPE-229943 When reusing book and quill most first pages in the book get the "enter" spaces removed. Resolved

MCPE-229862 Formatting is randomly removed in Book & Quill Resolved

MCPE-233863 Book and quil won't leave a space when I press ENTER Resolved

8 more links

Attachments

Comments 23

[MCQA] Zgajak 2025-11-17T13:12:28Z

Hi!

Could you please write on which version your previous worlds with books were created?
Can you please share this world?
Do you use specific addons?
Does this occur every time?
Does it occur on specific text formatting?

This ticket will automatically reopen when you reply.

Dave Matthews 2025-11-23T03:25:10Z

I'm having the same issue on the latest version of Minecraft bedrock it occurs some of the time I'm not sure what causes it

lil_smg 2025-12-09T19:35:38Z

The world was originally created on 1.19.60 i believe

I am unable to share the full world file as it contains private information like peoples real world names written on signs and in books. Since this is a public tracker where anyone can view and download said file, im not willing to upload it

There are no addons active, i am running the vanilla game

Yes

It seems to mostly occur with text formatted with bullet points like:

. Example text

After editing, closing, and reopening the book the text will all be jumbled and unformatted like this:

. Example text. Example text. Example text

. Example text. Example text

lil_smg 2025-12-09T19:51:04Z

I forgot to add in the previous message, this only appears to occur on books that are not signed, when you sign a book it saves the formatting, however as stated above when you edit, close, and reopen an unsigned book the formatting glitch occurs

xSnipez3 2026-01-29T15:10:47Z

Formatting issues appear to still be present in version 1.21.132; the world was created in version 1.21.132, and the book was newly crafted. This issue is also affecting signs.

13 more comments

Myrskylintu 2026-02-03T06:59:10Z

I’m having the same issue (Win 11, Minecraft Bedrock, Realms). Whenever I type standard text to a Book and Quill, such as:

“Here’s a sample text. Line break here
and now a new line, and now

an empty line in between.
The text is as it should appear.”

After I close the book and quill, and reopen the book, the text will look like:

”Here’s a sample text.Line break here and
now a new line, and now an empty line in 
between.     The text is as it should appear.”

The issue seems to affect the pages at random, but it will affect any pages on the book. The issue is especially aggravating as there’s no way to tell what pages get affected, so most of the time you’ll only see the results when you’ll finally sign the book, and consequently can’t edit it afterwards.

Myrskylintu 2026-02-03T07:02:08Z

Seems I can’t edit comments here either, so as it happens I forgot to add, that it doesn’t seem to matter that there are no special symbols within the book (such as “§” which can be input into the game using Nordic keyboards; or standard hyphens “-”, or even dots “.”). The issue seems to stand with or without special characters

lil_smg 2026-03-06T12:42:10Z

Update: Now Affects NEW Books Too (Vanilla 26.0-26.3 Realms) not just ones written before the GDK migration

Repro Steps

Get a book and quill

2. Type:

. Example Text

2. Close without signing & reopen → Line breaks vanish, bullets/alignment jumble into garbage

Affected: Latest Bedrock 26.3, completely vanilla Realms, no addons. Old worlds books were bad, but now fresh books break too – kills all book usage.

Quite frankly, I find it completely absurd that this issue was raised almost half a year ago (Oct 30, 2025) with full repro steps, yet the staff refuse to do anything about it despite 9+ votes and multiple confirms.

Vote up if broken for you aswell!

4147_SAO 2026-03-08T15:30:07Z

Same here

Rocsta122 2026-03-08T22:29:06Z

I'm having the same issue. Is there an ETA on the fix?

Noah 2026-03-15T13:56:33Z

Still happening… fix your game.

lil_smg 2026-03-25T14:45:29Z

Update: Now affects signed books aswell as of the 26.10 Tiny Takeover update because this awful dev team refuses to fix this bug

Repro Steps:

Get a signed book (doesnt matter if its an old or new book) and type some text in this format

. Example Text

Sign and close the book and reopen it a few times
Watch the text become jumbled and ruined

I would advise people reading this to just not open old books or write new books at all right now since they’re at high risk of being ruined by this bug, books on my server that people have spent a long time on are being ruined because of this bug that the bedrock dev team refuses to fix for whatever strange reason, wether it be incompetence or ignorance im not sure but as stated before do not write new books (or open old books now as of 26.10) in a world you care about since its likely to get ruined by this glitch

Please raise this if you’re having the same issue, this has been happening for almost half a year now and i would really like to see it fixed.

[MOD] Greymagic27 2026-03-30T17:59:10Z

I cannot reproduce this in the latest release.

lil_smg 2026-04-18T14:08:43Z

No, this is not resolved.

The bug is still happening in the latest release of the game, here is a clip of the formatting glitch happening to me today on a completely vanilla realm

This has been going on since October 2025 and got even worse after 26.10, stop marking it resolved when its clearly not fixed, mark it confirmed and escalate it.

[MOD] Greymagic27 2026-04-18T16:11:51Z

For some clarification, @lil_smg .

This bug report has an ADO number meaning it is on Mojang’s internal bug tracker.

The bug report was ‘resolved’ as ‘awaiting response’ as I was waiting to see if you could still reproduce the issue where I could not.

Andrew James Deller 2026-04-26T07:00:19Z

Can confirm, still happening. Specifically, opening an unsigned book and finding line breaks are gone from random pages, often replaced with a space. After adding back the breaks, and closing the book - upon re-opening breaks may or may not be gone again, on random pages.

Nate S 2026-04-26T22:47:02Z

This happens for books AND signs. Signs randomly lose formatting too. And if you try to retype the lost formatting, it typically just censors itself into #'s.

But I know that the #'s are obviously working as intended, that must be why people keeep uploading bug reports about them.

Hey Mega_Spud (Jay) and Ocelot_Onesie, are you sure this formatting loss isn’t working as intended? Maybe you want to review it again? I’m sure you’ll find the correct behavior somewhere in there.

Pepper 2026-05-08T19:11:11Z

this is occuring in books signed for me as well, if I write and format everything the books lose all formatting upon signing

littlejfonz 2026-05-15T01:17:23Z

From a short test, formatting only works on singleplayer/client, and the bug only occurs on multiplayer (likely to do with censorship). I’ve only started running into this issue a week ago but hasn’t gone away.

PetePlat 2026-05-16T10:12:51Z

v26.21

Short test (same new world for all tests, creative, peaceful).

Steps:

Load world
Get a book&quill from inventory
Write the example text from one of the previous comments
close the book
open and edit again
close the book
open it again

Cases:

On realm: could easily reproduce the bug
Local world, single player: could not reproduce
Local world, multiplayer, filter profanity on: could not reproduce
Local world, multiplayer, filter profanity off: could not reproduce

sanghyeop 2026-07-11T05:12:56Z

It doesn’t work well to me also. Line breaking and formatting code does not work in book and signs. If I reopen book, then all of formatting codes and linebreaks disappears, and this happens same to signs - if I finish writing, than all of line breaks and formatting code disappears immediatly

[Team Allay] jKakub 2026-09-07T11:54:19Z

Hi!
Thank you for your report!

However, this issue has been temporarily closed as Awaiting Response.

Please provide:

Consistent reproduction steps including exact text and formatting.
World this issue can be consistently reproduced with.
Your profanity settings (if issue can be reproduced only on Realms).

This ticket will automatically reopen when you reply. Thanks!

Quick Links:
📓 Issue Guidelines – 💬 Mojang Support – 📧 Suggestions – 📖 Minecraft Wiki

PetePlat 2026-09-10T15:16:35Z

Can not reproduce anymore with Bedrock v26.45 and current Realm.