Extended ASCII support for TextPad

[cytherian]

I've been using TextPad 5.x/6.0 for quite a while, and while I like it in many respects (the macro is super powerful), there's one thing that has been puzzling me.

Extended ASCII characters are not supported by default. When I paste in characters like ٩๏̯͡๏۶-̮̮̃•̃●̮̮̃̾-̮̮̃ all I get is ??????-??~~???~?-??~. When you paste the same set of characters in Windows Notepad, the characters are displayed just fine (going back to Windows 95). I went into the Preferences control for TextPad, and checked for settings under General, Editor, View, and Document Classes (Default, Text) and tried various settings... nothing worked. Not UTF-8, DOS, you name it.

I'm assuming there must be some way to do this. TextPad is so feature rich, it should be able to do anything wimpy lean Notepad can do. Anyone here have a clue? Thanks!

[Smelter.uk]

Which version are you using. I have the latest 6.1.3 and I can create the characters with the "Alt" sequence in a new texpad document, paste it into a new notepad document and paste it back into a another new texpad document with no settings changes from the default install.

[kengrubb]

I am not sure what you mean by "not supported".

I can type Extended ASCII characters just fine in TextPad.

Display of Extended ASCII characters is dependent upon the font you are using.

I just downloaded 6.2.2, but I could see them just fine with 6.1.3 and I'm not sure which earlier versions.

[MudGuard]

The question is: what is meant by "Extended ASCII"?

ASCII is a 7-bit-code, holding 128 characters (including letters a to z, A to Z, digits 0-9, some forms of parentheses, some interpunctuation chars, some control characters, and a handful of others like @.

Extended ASCII is sometimes used as an equivalent for CP-1252 or ISO-8859-1. Both are 8 bits, containing 256 characters, which include all ASCII, and lots of accentuated vowels, and some other.

The characters given in the original post have character codes (in Unicode) well beyond 256.
So they are not "Extended ASCII", but probably Unicode characters.

Textpad can only show characters from one codepage (e.g. CP-1252) at a time, a codepage contains 256 code points - so you would need to find a codepage that contains all the characters you need.

Or you might need an editor that is able to fully use Unicode ...

[cytherian]

Thanks for the responses. When I select "About TextPad" it just shows 6.0, no other info. But I've had this special character problem in versions 4.x and 5.x as well.

I apologize for my mistake of saying "Extended ASCII". It appears the characters that I can't get properly visualized in TextPad are in the Unicode character set. However, if I change my document class (default, text) encoding choice to be type Unicode, those special characters are still not recognized. As you can see, the website supports them. At least, I'm using Chrome and I can see the special characters I pasted (`°º¤ø,¸٩๏̯͡๏۶-̮̮̃•̃●̮̮̃̾-̮̮̃). The question mark translation (`°ºo,,??????-??~~???~?-??~) is how they appear in Textpad, no matter what encoding type I select. I do have the "Write unicode and UTF-8" option checked as well (and also tried it unchecked).

When I use Notepad or other editors, I have NO PROBLEM with these characters. It's only TextPad that can't seem to handle them (and I've run into this on Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7). So, is there some way to configure TextPad to recognize them? I would like to believe so, as it would be rather peculiar not to... given how an application as rudimentary as Notepad has no trouble with this, and so far I've yet to stumble into an another 3rd party editor that can't.


EDIT:
I downloaded the latest (6.2.2) and have some additional information.

For an existing TEXT document containing the extra characters I've shown above, some of them will display when loading the document in TextPad, such as "`°º¤ø,¸". However, if I directly copy/paste those characters in that VERY SAME DOCUMENT, they are displayed as different characters (which don't show that way here on the forum).

Also, these special characters, "٩๏̯͡๏۶-̮̮̃•̃●̮̮̃̾-̮̮̃", still will not paste properly in TextPad. Interestingly enough, if a text document created with Notepad includes them, I get the following error message:

WARNING: "document.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.


Again, Notepad has no problem supporting all of these characters simultaneously. Is TextPad somehow limited to only one given encoding page/type at a time? If so, I'm wondering why, when other editors don't have this restriction.

[MudGuard]

Is TextPad somehow limited to only one given encoding page/type at a time?

If you had read my posting, you would already know the answer.

[cytherian]

So I would need to create a custom code page? Or is there one in existence that I could obtain from somewhere on-line? I wonder if Notepad utilizes a generalized code page of some kind that could be utilized for Textpad.

[cytherian]

Is there any particular reason why the authors of Textpad decided not to support more than one set of 256 characters at a time? Or, is there some way to provide a custom code page that combines the characters from more than one code page?

It just puzzles me how very simplistic 3rd party and Microsoft text editors can manage to support more than 256 characters simultaneously, while the latest Textpad version still cannot.