Platform: macOS (Sonoma 14+), ChatGPT macOS Desktop App (latest version)
Language context: System language set to Chinese
Issue type: Clipboard encoding / Rich text copy-paste error
Bug Summary:
When copying Chinese text output from the ChatGPT macOS desktop application—particularly responses containing tables or formatted text—and pasting it into other applications (including the ChatGPT input field itself), the pasted result appears as unreadable garbled characters. This behavior does not occur when copying plain Chinese text from other macOS applications, or from the browser version of ChatGPT.
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Generate a response in the ChatGPT macOS app that includes Chinese text, preferably with table formatting or rich text structure.
2. Copy the output text.
3. Paste the copied content into:
• The ChatGPT app’s own input field
• Notes, TextEdit, Terminal, WeChat, or other standard text editors
4. Observe that characters appear as unreadable glyphs. For example:
鍦烘櫙 instead of 场景
鎻忚堪 instead of 描述
This Issue Does Not Occur When:
• Pasting into clipboard-aware applications such as Notion or Typora
• Copying Chinese text from the browser-based version of ChatGPT
• Copying English text (with or without formatting)
Technical Notes:
This issue appears to result from the way the ChatGPT macOS client places multiple formats (RTF, HTML, UTF-8 plain text) into the macOS clipboard. When pasting into applications that do not properly handle rich text encodings—or that incorrectly default to Latin-1 or GBK encodings—the UTF-8 Chinese characters are misinterpreted, leading to mojibake (garbled text).
It is likely that the app exposes clipboard content where the public.rtf or public.html formats are prioritized over public.utf8-plain-text, and that internal encoding metadata may be incorrectly interpreted.
Suggested Improvements:
• Add an explicit “Copy as Plain Text” option within the ChatGPT desktop client.
• When placing data on the clipboard, prioritize UTF-8 plain text over rich text formats when possible.
• Review encoding declarations in exported RTF/HTML layers to ensure compatibility with standard paste targets.
Why This Matters:
This issue significantly affects the usability of the ChatGPT macOS app for Chinese-speaking users who rely on copying model-generated output into other tools or environments. As table-based answers are commonly used for structured comparison or summarization, ensuring proper encoding in clipboard operations is important for multilingual accessibility and content reuse.
If further information or testing is helpful, I am happy to provide it.