ccollins wrote:Judging form the number of respondents to this poll, this must not be that important of an issue.
I think it means that there are actually far more in the "It's too late - I've already given up on TextPad" category, who aren't active here because they're just not interested now. I don't suppose we'll ever know how many users TextPad has lost because of this.
I'm very close to that category as well. I've been using Textpad for years, since at least 2002...probably before. I even bought another license in 2007. As much as I like the program, I can't continue to use it if it screws up my text files. At least with 4.7 and before, you could round trip a file, even if it didn't understand the encoding.
Notepad++ is our company standard editor on our dev machines now, not because it's free, but because it works. I'm feeling like a dinosaur when people notice I'm using Textpad. It's been a useful tool so far, but my recent troubles with it doing silly things like stipping the BOM when saving as UTF16LE is very frustrating...
I've also tried all these suggestions without success. I just need to be able to do things like type in names like Dvořák, Janaček and Martinů (3 Czech composers) or write hello in Greek (Υγειά σου) or Russian (привет). I can see those words corectlyas I write but they're not visible in the Preview (what others will see) and I can't even see those characters when I type them into TP, even though I've previously saved and reopened the file I'm writing to as UTF-8. Full UTF-8 support is a major priority for me, most likely also for any one of the millions speaking a language containing letters outside the "Western" ASCII codes <=255. I'm one of those thinking of migrating elsewhere...[/code]
I should note that we love and depend on Textpad daily - we've tried other editors and IDE's, and none provide the fast and fluid editing environment that Textpad provides. That said, this Unicode issue is forcing us to adopt alternatives.
I would buy another license, or refresh my licenses, to get Unicode support as well.
This half-baked sort-of-broken unicode support is misleading and dishonest. It caused problems for our customers and internal people because it seems like TextPad could edit a unicode file - but it totally broke the file it edited by failing to write out the same format it read in (not to mention messing up the character codes by forcing it into ANSI/local code page during the I/O journey).
Ridiculous.
Write what you read. Keep it Unicode for a Unicode file at all points in the edit-stream. And write out BOM always for UTF-16/UTF-32 (I suppose a back-door for some edge cases must be provided - but I don't need that, and it sounds dubious to me that such things really exist, but somewhere someone f*!@#ed that up, I'm sure).
