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does Textpad really handle Unicode characters?

Posted: Tue Feb 17, 2009 4:49 am
by kevinHealy
I am using TP 5.2.

In Preferences, I set .txt files to use Arial Unicode MS for both printer and screen, since that font has great Unicode coverage.

I then tried copying known unicode stuff (Chinese chars copied from a wikipedia page) to a newly created .txt file. The chars, however, always show up as ??.

Note that I tried ALL 3 of the Unicode encodings in the Save dialog box (UTF-8, Unicode, and Unicode big endian)--all fail.

Also, I know that the copying process must be good, because if I paste into MS Word with that Arial Unicode MS font, the chars all show up correct.

So it must be a bug in Textpad, right?

Or am I doing something wrong?

Posted: Tue Feb 17, 2009 1:21 pm
by ben_josephs
No, Textpad does not properly support Unicode; it only supports 8-bit character sets. (These "scripts" can be selected from
Configure | Preferences | Document Classes | <Class> | Font | Script
or
View | Document Properties | Font | Script. )

Chinese cannot be represented in an 8-bit character set.