TextPad and Unicode: full support?

Question

I've got some UTF-8 files created in Mac, and when trying to open them using TextPad in Windows, I get the following warning:

WARNING: (file name) contains characters that do not exist in code page 1252 (ANSI Latin 1). They will be converted to the system default character, if you click OK.

Linux (GNOME gEdit) can open the same file without complaints. What does the above mean? I thought that TextPad had full UTF-8 support. Can I safely open and edit UTF-8 files using it without corrupting the file?

Answer 1

It seems that TextPad cannot handle characters outside windows-1252 (CP1252, here carrying the misnomer “ANSI Latin 1”). I tested it on Windows, opening a plain text file created on the same system, as UTF-8 encoded, both with and without BOM, with the same result. The program’s help does not seem to contain anything related to character encodings, and its tools for writing “international characters” are for Latin-1 characters only.

There are several text editors for Windows that can deal with UTF-8 (even Notepad can open a UTF-8 file, but it can hardly be recommended for serious editing). See Alan Wood’s collection of information on Unicode editors and word processors for Windows. (Personally, I like Notepad++ and BabelPad, which are both free.)

Answer 2

TextPad ‘supports’ UTF-8 and UTF-16 documents only in as much as it will import and export them. But it still edits files as simple bytes, and not Unicode characters (using the ANSI code page, which is code page 1252 for Western European).

So unless the file happened to contain only characters that also exist in that code page, you will lose content. This rather defeats the point of Unicode.

Indeed, this was the issue that made me flee—to EmEditor, at the time, though now I would agree with the previous comments and recommend Notepad++. The era of paying for text editors is long gone.

Answer 3

TextPad 8, the newest as of 2016-01-28, does finally properly support BMP Unicode. It's a paid upgrade, but so far has been working flawlessly for me.

Answer 4

Textpad Configure Menu --> Preferences --> Document Classes --> Default --> Default encoding --> UTF-8

Answer 5

Actually TextPad does support displaying Unicode code points granted they went about it the wrong way. In order to display the Unicode characters you have to choose Configure->Preferences and expand "Document Classes->Text->Font.

You need to choose a Unicode font AND set the Script to match. E.g. Arial Unicode MS with script CHINESE_BIG5.

However, this is a backward approach since the application should handle this when the user tells TextPad to open the file in Unicode or UTF-8. The built in Notepad application with MS Windows will detect the encoding automatically and display the glyphs correctly based upon the encoding.

Answer 6

I found a discussion on this in the Textpad forums: http://forums.textpad.com/viewtopic.php?t=11019

While I have Notepad++, Textpad handles large files with ease while other editors I've tried, including Notepad++, either slow to a crawl or die. I'm currently trying to edit a 475MB file and Notepad++ is not up to the task.

Answer 7

Try the ANSI code set with File/Open, that should solve the problem in TextPad