Dear Unicoders, Because of the recent thread about UniPad, I think that not everybody on this list knows about UniPad yet. Therefore I'm posting this release note especially for the list members and the community of Unicoders, summarizing the important features. I will also outline what can not be done with UniPad yet.
UniPad by Sharmahd Computing is a plain text editor for Unicode, running on the Microsoft operating systems Windows 95/98/ME/NT4/2000/XP. It comes with a built-in bitmap font available in two styles: variable width and fixed width. This font includes glyphs for almost 52000 characters covering the character repertoire of Unicode 3.2, except Plane 2 ideographs. Gathering and installing fonts is not necessary. Not all scripts are fully supported; by default a nominal glyph will be used to depict a character, which is sufficient in many cases. All scripts that do not require special text processing are supported. Additionally, Arabic contextual form shaping is supported along with bidirectional text (bidi). Arabic shaping and bidi can be turned on and off easily, which can be quite useful. Supported formats (i. e. encoding schemes) are: UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32, UTF-7, ASCII + Universal Character Names (i. e. \u sequences), Standard Compression Scheme for Unicode, ASCII + XML Character References. Files can imported from and exported to several single-byte and multi-byte encodings: ISO 8859, Windows codepages, DOS codepages, Macintosh, KOI-8, VNI, VIQR, TCVN, VPS, VISCII, ISIRI-3342, Shift-JIS, KS X 1001 (EUC-KR), Big Five, CNS 11643 (EUC-TW), GB 2312 (EUC-CN), JIS X 0208 (EUC-JP), ARMSCII-8, GEOSTD8, TIS-620. Conversions can also be done through the clipboard using "Copy As" and "Paste As" commands (a feature I use quite often myself). Possible input methods are: clicking on a character map, direct hex input, system keyboard (including installable Windows keyboards and East Asian IMEs), built-in virtual keyboards, user-defined loadable keyboards and certain third-party keyboard tools. About 60 built-in keyboards are available. A virtual keyboard window allows visual control of the selected keyboard and "typing" with the mouse. User-defined keyboards may be created by dragging characters from the character map to the keyboard window. Individual display modes for certain character categories like spaces, formatting characters, unassigned codepoints, unpaired surrogates and such, can be changed seperately for each document. A statusbar shows all relevant information about the character under the cursor: name, block, category, bidi category, encoded byte sequence, etc. More: multilevel undo/redo, search and replace, printing, sending documents via email, several text conversions (uppercase, lowercase, resolving \u sequences, combining, etc.), configurable BOM handling, auto-detection and several common editor features. The following things are not supported yet: shaping of Indic scripts (like Devanagari), vertical editing (for CJK, Mongolian), built-in keyboards with complex input methods (e.g. Tibetan or Ethiopian), conjoining Hangul Jamo behaviour, visual combination of non-spacing characters with base characters (however, pre-composed characters can be typed using dead-key input method and explicit composing/ decomposing can be done), shaping of Syriac and Mongolian, variation selectors, Plane 2 ideographs. I hope to soon provide a road-map showing our schedule for implementing these missing features. I guess, I forgot something to mention. So please check it out yourself. UniPad Home: http://www.unipad.org Download: http://www.unipad.org/download Screenshots: http://www.unipad.org.cold/techinfo/screenshots/editor.html http://www.unipad.org.cold/techinfo/screenshots/keyboard_layout.html http://www.unipad.org.cold/techinfo/screenshots/character_map.html Thank you for your interest. -- Torsten Mohrin, UniPad Team Sharmahd Computing http://www.unipad.org
