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I've filed two bugs so far, and want to know if anyone else is seeing the same prolems. I'm running Windows XP Professional with the East Asian language installed, but US English as the default language and code page.

1) I have a log file that is encoded as UTF-8, but does not contain the UTF-8 Byte Order Mark (BOM) prefix. Notepad figures out that it is in UTF-8; TextPad 4.62 appears to think it is Shift-JIS (code page 932). The Japanese characters it displays are not the correct UTF-8 characters.

2) I have a SQL script encoded as UTF-8 WITH the UTF-8 BOM. The SQL script contains French characters like é. When I open this in TextPad 4.62, I get an error from TextPad that the file "contains characters that do not exist in code page 932 (ANSI/OEM - Japanese Shift-JIS)". Of course it does, it is a UTF-8 file. Notepad reads it correctly.

Anyone else have thoughts/suggestions? I haven't heard from Helios yet (although I just filed the second of these this morning).

What happens if you select UTF8 encoding when opening the file?

Hello Eric,

I have been trying to email you, but the mail keeps being rejected.

The addition of the UTF-8 BOM was a planned feature for version 4.6, and the purpose of the signature is to unambiguously identify UTF-8 files.

Previously, TextPad did a statistical analysis of files as it opened
them, to check if they were UTF-8. Unless a file contained two or more characters of UTF-8 sequences, it had to start with the Unicode signature, to be correctly recognised.

If there was 32kb of text before any UTF-8 sequences, then the file was not recognized as UTF-8.

http://www.unicode.org/unicode/faq/utf_bom.html

TextPad does not have full support for Unicode, so please see the information on this subject, which is available from the TextPad Help menu as follows:

From the Help menu choose:

1. Help Topics
2. Contents
3. Plus sign next to "How to"
4. Plus sign next to "Work with Files"
5. Unicode Files


Kind regards,

Stephen MacDonald
Helios Software Solutions
http://www.textpad.com

Unfortunately the behaviour described is not how a Windows program should work.

Characters not recognized should be displayed by a "?".
Characters recognized but not available in the current font should be displayed by a little box.

I don't know if this is standard behaviour or just common behaviour but at least if TextPad conformed to this I could edit the parts of my files that are viewable with textpad and save my changes without screwing up my file.