Tuesday 26 June 2007

Creating Unicode Content

It is quite some time since my last entry. So trying to defy the opinions that the usual blog's life time is 3 months - let me post this and share with you some information about writing true Unicode text files using TextPad...

Why TextPad? Well, it is because it is my favoutite editor. It is windows based. I have it installed at work and obviously it has its Polish release. It is extensible and there are many addons available for it. It refreshes the content in case of file changed. It is also capable of dealing with huge files.

Unicode Editors
There are some other editors available as well like:
  • jEdit, infrequently used by me, which is a great open source, extensible and free Java editor.

  • UltraEdit, infrequently used by me, which is very good and reach in features but may prove costly (not checked their new Lite version yet)


  • You can also use notepad but even thinking about it hurts...


Setup presentation
Anyways, back to the TextPad. I had recently a few Unicode files to write and, as it usually happens, not a lot of time to spend to configure the tool. So went to ask colleagues to find out about the details, as they have done it recently. But hey - they managed to forget it all. Setup is really simple but you need to spend some time to get the document persistance right to be able to write correct file format. Then setup the font so the tool is capable of displaying characters on the screen. I thought it would be a good idea to capture those little details in a form of presentation for future reference. And give my new open source screen casting software WINK a test drive.

So here it is - mind you, since it is a flash movie make sure your add blocker allows it to execute:









TextPad Addon
One last thing mentioned during the presentation is my custom written TextPad addon. I created it to help me writing ANSI files containing Polish Unicode character codes. Feel free to download it and use it. In order to install it simply drop it into the TextPad\Samples directory and re-run the application.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for this excellent post. I was having a nightmare trying to create a Polish web site.