How to Italicize Text in TextPad?

[mhill]

I notice that when I copy-and-paste foreign language text from, say, Wikipedia to TextPad, it retains the foreign characters. More importantly, when I copy the text from TextPad into a tweet, the foreign characters are retained! Woo-hoo!!

For example, in French, accent aigu (é) and accent grave (è).

I suspect that TextPad is smart enough to recognize unicode.

Is there a way--in TextPad--to manually write the foreign language characters? If I can stay in TextPad, without having to search for the word somewhere else and copy-and-paste it, that would be my preferred route.

I am now wondering if there is also a way to make TextPad recognize unicode for italicized text? Again, if that could be done manually--within TextPad--that would be awesome.

(Basically, I am trying to find a simpler way to spice up my tweets by getting the coding worked out beforehand in TextPad.)

[MudGuard]

accented characters can be created by typing the accent and then the character, e.g. type the ´ and then the e and you get é.
(when you type the accent, it won't appear until you type another character)

There is also a command "EditUnicodeCharacter" - which is, afaik, not assigned to any menu item or keyboard combination.
In Configure - Preferences - Keyboard you can assign it to a keyboard combination (I use ALT-U).
If you then type ALT-U, a small editing window appears in which you can enter the codepoint of the Unicode character you want - e.g. 20AC for the Euro sign.

[AmigoJack]

As far as I know french AZERTY keyboard layouts typically don't have acute and grave deadkeys, but instead deadkeys for circumflex and diaresis:



In TextPad's menu choose View > Clip Library and in that tool window select ANSI Characters - now you have a limited list that should also display a couple of accented letters - just doubleclick on one to have it inserted.

[ben_josephs]

You can find the information you need in TextPad's help by searching for
How to Type Multilingual Characters

Dead keys, described by MudGuard and AmigoJack, are not available with standard US or UK keyboard layouts.

A character and its italicized counterpart are not distinct characters; they are the same character rendered in a different font style. I suspect that the italicised characters you are referring to are the Unicode mathematical characters listed at
https://unicode-search.net/unicode-name ... erm=italic
These are 17-bit characters, represented in 16 bits as a pair of surrogates in the ranges D800–DBFF and DC00–DFFF. If you think it's worth it, you might put in the effort to produce a simple-to-use mechanism to enter them in TextPad. But the result might not be what you hope on every recipient's device.

Well, I found this:
https://yaytext.com/how-to/italic-text-twitter/

[AmigoJack]

Oh, now I get it. What https://yaytext.com/bold-italic achieves for a text like théâtre is to use combining characters that are meant to augment the preceding character (and as such to give one letter multiple additions, like diaresis and Cedille at the same time).

But if you look close enough both the circumflex and accent acute are not in italics. Which is not suprising.

Long story short: keep your hands off even using such characters. They look similar to what you want them to use for, but you will only create disaster with them. Whoever tries to find text might never get a match on those characters.

Test: �����̂��� is indeed found when searching for theatre when using Vivaldi as browser.