Image files don’t contain any line feeds or carriage returns, but since WordPad looks at the image data as if it were text it looks for 0x0D and 0x0A in the image file which mean something completely unrelated for images. In text editors the meaning is the same, a 0x0A tells the editor to move to the next line and a 0x0D tells the editor to move to the beginning of the line. This nomenclature comes from mechanical typewriters where a line of physical paper is fed through the roller (line feed) and the carriage is returned to the beginning of the line (carriage return). Line breaks are some bytes that tell text editors and word processors where they should break the text and continue on the next line.ĭifferent operating systems handled them slightly differently, the bytes involved are what’s called a Line Feed, represented by 0x0A in hexadecimal, and a carriage return, 0x0D in hexadecimal. So what’s going on here? For the curious, a cursory comparison of the before and after files seems to confirm my suspicion that the transformation, at least in some part, has to do with WordPad converting line breaks when it loads in the image. The splash image for this post was simply opened and then saved, the WordPad Effect did the rest. You can also try deleting some random text from the file before saving, but it’s not required to glitch the image. The process of opening and saving the image using WordPad invokes what has been dubbed the WordPad Effect. Wait for WordPad to load the image as a document and then press Ctrl+S on your keyboard to Save or use the menu to Save the file. Open your BMP image in WordPad by selecting All Documents(*.*) in the dropdown beside the File name field. If you can’t find WordPad, press the Win + R keys, type in “write” and press Enter, WordPad should open. Then select 24-bit Bitmap (*.bmp *.dib) from the Save as type dropdown, other types of BMP will work as well to varying degrees. Open your file and then choose Save as and BMP picture. If you can’t find Paint, press the Win + R keys, type in “pbrush” and press Enter, Paint should open.

This can be done with any image editing software, but since this tutorial is about WordPad we’re going to use one of its fellow Microsoft applications, Microsoft Paint, which is also included with most versions of Microsoft Windows. To start glitching with WordPad we need to convert our source image to a BMP (Bitmap) file.

Datamosh video with audacity