Unicode Input

[SteveH]

One failing of all the text editors I have tried that claim to support Unicode is that there seems to be no way to get the characters in there easily. Notwithstanding all of the pretty screenshots showing multiple language support within a single document, the route available to input this data is generally pretty limited.

I guess users of other languages will probably be accomodated by their local settings but it would be useful to quickly introduce characters from non-English languages quickly. On Windows I have never found a way to do this quickly and often have to resort to using Word to find the characters I need.

I would like to have access to something like the Clip Library that gave me direct access to the characters supported in each code table for the font currently in use. Use a font that only supports Basic and Extended Latin and those are the only drop-downs available; use a font with good Unicode support and you get Greek and Coptic, Cyrillic, Hebrew etc.

This should make it relatively easy to input a series like

Љ Ԏ ญ ༄

Let's see what browsers make of that lot!

[ben_josephs]

TextPad does not properly support Unicode. Each document must be rendered in its entirety in one of the 8-bit "scripts" that can that can be selected from
Configure | Preferences | Document Classes | <Class> | Font | Script
or
View | Document Properties | Font | Script.

These scripts are (with the code pages I think they correspond to):

Code: Select all

Western            1252
Greek              1253
Turkish            1254
Central European   1250
Cyrillic           1251

So I expect you're out of luck with Coptic and Hebrew.

If the Unicode files you are dealing with are small, it may be worth your while to look at the free version of Unipad (http://www.unipad.org/).

[SteveH]

TextPad does not properly support Unicode.

It would be nice if it did wouldn't it?

The UniPad character map is pretty close to what I am thinking of. I think it could be made so much prettier though. It just looks so old-skool compared to TP.

[mo]

If one does any sort of work in multiple languages then these clipboard solutions will not do. We need to be able to input UNICODE with the usual Alt+0000.

[SteveH]

Agreed, but it would help to have access to the characters in each code page rather than having to work in hex.

[Guvnikov]

Just having support to properly open/display unicode files would be awesome. At least then those using an IME could use textpad. (though font maps are nice to have).

Can't even open files with unicode characters in them at the moment without trashing all the unicode bits.

[S. Harrison]

I've found an excellent way to input Unicode: Download Tavultesoft Keyman.

However, TextPad doesn't support Unicode input. AFAIK under Windows, the options are:

(1) Unipad
(2) OpenOffice Writer
(3) MS Word 2003

[SteveH]

It sounds as though with Keyman the user has to be familiar with each keyboard layout to use it. I didn't seen any screenshots showing how the application works, I imagine some system tray switch of keyboard layout but would love to see more if there are links.

UniPad has the character map to input Unicode but the application just looks so ugly compared to a TextPad. EmEditor supports Unicode but does not have an easy means to enter the data. Word and Unicode have one method of doing this but I really like the Apple Mac technique and it's something similar to that I would like to see in TextPad 5.0.

[S. Harrison]

Yes, Keyman a tray icon. You're right that you have to get to know each keyboard layout. The program itself is very self-explanatory. You have to download your keyboards separately, usually from third parties -- but the Keyman website has a directory.

You can set up hotkeys for specific keyboards. I use Greek a lot, so I just set up Alt+G to toggle into and out of Greek.

ἐν ἀρχῆ ἦν ὁ λόγος, καὶ ὁ λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν θεὸν, καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος.

It turns out that one of the best ways to input Unicode is using a web application for which the underlying database supports it.

The benefits of using Keyman are (1) you can have the same keyboard layout for every application that supports Unicode input. (2) you can toggle easily between whatever languages you're using.

That doesn't help with TextPad immediately, but Keyman at least provides a way to remove one element of complexity, by providing a unified way to manage Unicode input.

[Luap777]

jedit is an option also. Very simple to make macros to insert the needed character in unicode, you can customize the keyboard shortcuts (to run your macro to insert character) with any weird combination of keys your heart desires, so easy to make them easy to remember. It is a bit resource hungry, but once you get it set up the way you want, it's quite nice.


for emdash for example,

textArea.setSelectedText("\u2014");

make one for all the characters you might need.

[SteveH]

Postscript: For a while now I've been using PopChar from Egronis Software.



It's expensive for what it does but it does do it well and is much better than Windows built in equivalent.[/img]

[Jurrich]

http://www.babelstone.co.uk/Software/BabelMap.html

This program is free, and about as complete as you can possibly want (unless you want to search for particular characters, but then if you want to do that you would have the character available for input already so this is not something that would affect you)