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) co

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

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 3

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

Answer 4

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 5

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 6

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