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
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Wed Aug 28 2002 - 13:50:29 EDT