Unicode characters

[Luoji]

Hi,

I'd like to display unicode characters such as ǚ, ŏ or ī but it is impossible. Nightmare-ms-word is able to do that but when I save my ms-word document in unicode format, I get this message when I try to open it in Textpad:

"WARNING: "temp.txt" contains characters that do not exist in code page 1252 (ANSI - Latin I). They will be converted to the system default character, if you click OK.

OK | Cancel"

What should I do?

[Keith MacDonald]

Hi Luoji,

TextPad edits files internally in DBCS, so converts Unicode files using the code page that corresponds to the font script you are using. Try changing it from "Western" to "Central European".

Regards,

Keith MacDonald
Helios Software Solutions

[Nick Dierauf]

But how do you add "Central European" to the Scripts pull-down control. I only have "Western" as a selection option.
Thanks, Nick.

[Filip Brazdil]

Hi,
I have the same problem as Luoji, but I do not understand your answer. I went to the Text document class settings in Text Pad and selected a Central European font for this class (I am trying to open an *.INI file). Next time I open TextPad, the settings stays at Central European font, however I keep getting the same message if I try to open that file.
Was that what I am supposed to do?
I have just downloaded version 4.6.2, 32-bit, I am running Windows 2000 Professional Czech language version, SP3.
Thanks
Filip

[dburry]

okay, after much puzzling, I finally found where to change the "script" used out of the ones supported by each font (not every font supports every script, you have to try different fonts if you only see "western" listed)... For the others of you who were puzzled, note this word "script" means a language display script, not a programming script. It's right there in the same dialog you use to choose the font.

Note: this helps sometimes, but not when I have, say, chinese and korean in the same file... one or the other gets messed up no matter what I do!

Does anyone know of a better international editor? This is very annoying...

Dave

[fburry]

To answer my own question regarding a better unicode editor, I found UniPad!

http://www.unipad.org/main/

At initial glance it looks promising, I may make it my default editor for certain types of files if it has better unicode support and the lack of any advanced textpad-like features doesn't irk me too much.

Dave

[dburry]

Never mind my last post, I'm not willing to pay a hundred bucks to edit one damn file... the search continues...

Dave

[dburry]

okay, UniRed seems a bit better!

http://www.esperanto.mv.ru/UniRed/ENG/index.html

I was able to actually save a file this time... and it has cool XML syntax highlighting too, and supports unix line endings.
I will probably use this to edit my multi-lingual files from now on, unless I find something better...

Dave

[ajmas]

I must admit unicode and utf-8 support, on MS-Windows, outside of Microsoft's applications is very poo, and this is not limited to Textpad. I would like to see better UTF-8 support with Textpad. Although it has not been a need up to now it is becoming increasingly more important. I am working with, amongst things, XML and since we have been asked to have them in UTF-8, with support for non-Roman characters Textpad is not doing the job too well for me

In a future version of Textpad I would like to see the following features:

- Ability to open files with file names outside of the Roman character set. so
this would include japanese and chinese characters.
- Ability to view files in UTF-8 and UTF-16. At least allow me to specify the format of the file if auto format detection is too problematic to implement.
- Possibility to specifiy the encoding of the file when creating a new document

BTW I havel installed support for all regions ( control-panels->regional options and then check all the language settings). Copying and pasting from windows character map in Windows 2000 shows the characters being replaced with question marks.

[ajmas]

In my quest for a good Unicode complient editor I came across Babelpad (oh, and it is free ). These is much better than Unired, in the sense that it supports Chinese and Japanese characters, which Unired doesn't seem to support. The URL is as follows:

http://uk.geocities.com/BabelStone1357/ ... elPad.html

A good page on Unicode compliant software can be found at:

http://www.unicode.org/onlinedat/products.html

[mo]

glad to see this supports Ogham! The Goddess will appreciate it.

[Joey]

You should try EM Editor.
Can be found here:
http://www.emurasoft.com/

It doesn't replace TextPad, but it perfectly helps to solve some problems.