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Any plans for making TextPad UTF-8 capable?

Last I checked, this was not an option.

Works fine for me. No problem in over a year.

Do make sure you use a font that can display the Unicode glyphs though. The default Courier does not. Courier New works for me. YMMV.

BTW - I recommend you do *not* add the Byte-Order Mark (BOM). It is meaningless and can seriously harm your code.

That's odd. I'm using courier new, and I get a message saying:

"contains characters that do not exist in code page 1252 (ANSI-Latin I)"

Are you sure about this?

dare2go wrote:That's odd. I'm using courier new, and I get a message saying:

"contains characters that do not exist in code page 1252 (ANSI-Latin I)"

Are you sure about this?

TP does not fully support unicode so i wouldn't worry to much about the comments from webwiz. Changing the font won't help to make TP fully support unicode.

gan wrote:

dare2go wrote:That's odd. I'm using courier new, and I get a message saying:

"contains characters that do not exist in code page 1252 (ANSI-Latin I)"

Are you sure about this?

TP does not fully support unicode so i wouldn't worry to much about the comments from webwiz. Changing the font won't help to make TP fully support unicode.

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Hmm; the main reason I prefer to use TextPad at all is that 1) it can fully understand UTF-8, and 2) line numbers enabled from the View menu allow me to find XML syntax errors generated by Flare, the online authoring tool we use here.

Have you done this? => in TextPad 5, navigate from the menu: Configure > Preferences ... > Document Classes > Default. Be sure that 1) "Write Unicode and UTF-8 BOM" check box is selected, and 2) the Default encoding radio button for UTF-8 is selected. Click Apply and OK.

I just joined in today here, and was somewhat mystified to see all the lamenting re: UTF-8. We localize our manual to seven languages including Japanese and simplified Chinese, and TextPad has proven to be invaluable for finding compiling errors.

Hope this helps; cheers, dg
8)

I just joined in today here, and was somewhat mystified to see all the lamenting re: UTF-8

The problem (AIUI) is that TextPad can only edit within a single code page although it does support multiple code pages. The following is from the textPad help file:

WARNING: This means that it is only possible to edit, without data loss, files containing characters from the implied code page. Other characters will be converted into a system default character (normally "?"), if you confirm that is what you want to do.

It's worth looking at how TextPad handles a UTF-8 file containg characters from multiple code pages. The sort of file I mean is available here.

dg wrote:Hmm; the main reason I prefer to use TextPad at all is that 1) it can fully understand UTF-8, and 2) line numbers enabled from the View menu allow me to find XML syntax errors generated by Flare, the online authoring tool we use here.

Have you done this? => in TextPad 5, navigate from the menu: Configure > Preferences ... > Document Classes > Default. Be sure that 1) "Write Unicode and UTF-8 BOM" check box is selected, and 2) the Default encoding radio button for UTF-8 is selected. Click Apply and OK.

I just joined in today here, and was somewhat mystified to see all the lamenting re: UTF-8. We localize our manual to seven languages including Japanese and simplified Chinese, and TextPad has proven to be invaluable for finding compiling errors.

I'm surprised you never had any issues with textpad in the case you describe, but to change the settings won't make a difference. The problem is textpad and not the settings.

A simple example is this file: http://rapidshare.com/files/135885786/test.txt
This file have the same line in 16 different languages and 4 lines is filled with "?" when opened with textpad. Using emeditor everything is correct.

Open that text file using textpad and do the same with a text editor that is 100% unicode compliant like emeditor and see the difference. No settings can fix this problem.

I think textpad is great, but have some minor issues that could be a big problem sometimes. The unicode is one of the reasons i need another texteditor in addition to textpad.

Edit: Sorry, i didn't see that Steve already provided an example.

Here's an illustration of the differences gan was mentioning using his text file.



In this case the editor on the left, BBEdit, can display all the characters in the file while TextPad is unable to handle all the characters. There is no way to display the whole file within the present version of TextPad.

Disclaimer:These screenshots were generated on a Mac but the text handling limitations are still present. The great advantage of this is that I don't have to show a competing product in this forum.

Please see this long-running thread.

That it can't display them is one thing, but the big problem is that it doesn't even remember what they are.

I just tried EMEditor and it supports UTF8, I just made a HTML file in UTF8 and put in chinese + english in with copy/paste then checked on the browser, it works flawlessly.

I'll try it out maybe I'll stop using textpad and use this one instead as I want to start doing UTF8 compatible sites from now on.

Textpad has kind of stopped in time and is not taking this issue seriously so a lot of people will just move elsewhere. This issue is in discussion since 2004 and I think 5 years is more than enough time to fix it.

Please add this as another feature request and/or bug ticket for proper utf-8 support.

We have 100 licenses for TextPad where I work and most of the users are die hard "pry TextPad off of my cold, dead hands" fans. It took a lot of effort to prove and explain what 'broken' means in terms of utf-8 support.

It is a shame for a product with such following to ignore what seems to be a basic feature.

Thanks

(Yes, I registered just to post this request)

Textpad is the best editor for English language but it does not support Unicode UTF 8 characters of Indian languages.

Please let me know If any update or addon is available.

Regards,