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I'd be happy if I could open a file containing both English and Japanese characters

I would not normally recommend or promote another text editor in this forum but as you say, this is beyond the current capabilities of TextPad. For this kind of file I would use EmEditor, switching to the Japanese font category and using MS Gothic font.

You had me at "Klingon". Will you touch my keyboard please?

I did a stint with NLS support when I was a fully-employed guru with a major multinational, and dealing with the Asia-Pacific region on a language support basis was a real eye-opener for me. In 1992, that is. But to this day, the US companies dealing with the NLS issue have not even agreed on methods, let alone actually done anything to resolve the problem (this was to do with antivirus and managed data retrieval, so it was important AND conceptually difficult, which is 2 strikes right away in the commercial software community).

I completely agree that Unicode support is so far beyond "must" that it's in another league. But I also agree (and as a wannabe programmer I know just how much) it will be difficult to plan, let alone implement each step.

But the step has to be taken by the amazingly focused Helios developers, or it'll be taken for them by someone else.

I note that this thread has been running for a couple of years now. I wish I'd thought of joining the forum when I discovered Textpad in [EDIT]2001 (prior to that I used PFE, which is amazingly enough still robust and well-written to run natively on Windows XP x64, where most installers still have trouble running!), but if wishes was fishes, etc.

I'm also learning arabic and mandarin, just for the hell of it. So I've discovered what 2/3 of the real world already knows : left-to-rightness is one of the first problems you strike in the computer area, and to their credit, MS have actually thought through some (not all) of their products and interoperability.

Me, I'm just trying to remember to use WideChar and AnsiWideChar in all my file and string routines in Delphi. But at least the option is there for us little guys!

Thanks, Jill, for being so NOT rude, patient, humorous, and by golly I learned a lot from your posts! Thanks heaps.
Cheers from down under (that's rednu nwod morf sreehC, kinda)

It is now 2009 and as far as I am aware this issue has still sadly not been resolved. Does Helios have an official position on this? Can we expect basic unicode improvements at some point in the future or is enhanced unicode support off the table permanently?

If the official stance is the latter, I think this may deal a fatal blow to textpad's userbase - which would be a real shame.

I suspect that this plea will fall on deaf ears. The conclusion I have come to is that Helios will not speculate on future features. As I’ve said before that’s their right but cuts both ways.

Looking back at the top 10 most requested features from 2004, it looks like this:

1. Editable Macros
2. Expand/Collapse blocks of text
3. Additional attributes for syntax hig...
4. Export/Import Textpad settings
5. Show matching brackets
6. Treeview in the document selector
7. Auto-Complete
8. binary file improvements
9. Unicode Conformance
10. Find and Replace - Grand Unification...

I’ve no reason to think that the aspirations of users has changed much in those 5 years.

In my mind this is a pretty good sample of what the users want to see in TextPad and it will be pretty clear which have been implemented since then. I would just count 'em up and draw whatever conclusion you can from that.