Right, I've been trying stuff for the past several hours and nothing's working. Already googled the issue I'm having and by all indications it's unresolvable and I'm a dummy for having it happen in the first place, but hey I might get a lucky shot.
So I've been working in Wordpad (I am a lazy person otherwise I'd have gotten something else) for the last month or so writing a thing, got to around 5k words. Computer up and crashed while I had it open (I was trying to download a dropbox file which ended up being a folder ... but it tried to open it in Microsoft word, which I don't have on the computer. But I found the folder itself downloaded safely later. Point is, the strain caused the crash) and when I turned the computer back on, a most unpleasant thing had happened to my document - it went blank, for lack of a better word. It's the same size file as before, text color's the same though it changed font from Calibri to Courier New, and you can highlight the spaces where the text should be, there's just nothing there.
I've tried system file check, antivirus to see if I accidentally a Trojan somehow, uploading the file onto OneDrive (Windows 10, didn't have any choice it came with the computer and I don't care enough to get it off) and redownloading it, no change. Copy and pasting yields nothing, various file recovery programs do nada, etc.
Like I said, I googled the issue and it's by far not an uncommon one. Unfortunately by all indications it's unfixable if I don't have a backup, which I didn't.
http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/forum/helproom-1/data-missing-wordpad-documents-4271162/The guy in that link mentioned that he opened up his fucked file in Word and got a bunch of blank squares, and in Office only to get a bunch of #s. Unfortunately I haven't found a case where the thing was actually fixed.
So, any last-ditch ideas, or should I just accept fate's genitals and rewrite the thing?
Apologies for any incoherence, I'm real tired at the moment.
one more info piece: selecting all the 'text' and underlining it does result in the thing being underlined. It's just that it's only underlining blank space for some reason.