A client was recently testing some customization changes, and they determined that the long text field would only hold 3,969 character. They created a block of text in Microsoft Word, counted the characters, and found that the long text field would not contain it all.

The reason was that the text included carriage returns. Keep in mind that when you enter data in a multi-line text field, each carriage return also counts as characters, in most cases it is two ASCII characters – CR (Carriage Return) & LF (Line Feed).