Powerful Unicode Text Editor
Edit Text Files in Any Language, Script or Code Page

Edit Any Text File with EditPad Pro

EditPad Pro is a powerful text editor for Windows. You can edit all text files with EditPad Pro. Open text files saved on Linux, UNIX and Macintosh computers, or even text files from old DOS PCs or IBM mainframes. EditPad Pro preserves the file's compatibility with those systems, unless you explicitly convert it. You'll never have to worry about being unable to open a text file, and you'll always be able to save your files in a format that people with less flexible text editors can read.

EditPad Pro handles DOS/Windows, UNIX/Linux and Macintosh line breaks. Open and save text files encoded in Unicode (UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32), any Windows code page, any ISO-8859 code page, and a variety of DOS, KOI8 and EBCDIC code pages. Convert files between any of these encodings.

Type in Any Language or Script

You can use any keyboard layout and any IME (input method editor) for any language or script that Windows provides in the Regional Settings in the Control Panel. If you set the default encoding in EditPad to Unicode, you can use all languages and scripts at the same time in a single file.

You can even use exotic scripts that don't have legacy Windows code pages, or built-in support from Windows. EditPad Pro is fully compatible with all your virtual keyboard drives, such as those created with the Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator (MSKLC).

EditPad Pro's character map allows you to insert any character supported by the current file's encoding, which is very convenient for working with characters or languages that you cannot type on your keyboard. The status bar can indicate the code page numbers and Unicode code points of characters as you type or scroll through a file.

The only feature missing in EditPad right now is proper right-to-left support for Arabic and Hebrew. This support will be added in an upcoming version.

Insert any character known to humanity in your Unicode text files. You can restrict EditPad’s character to certain classes of characters, such as lowercase letters, so you’ll find the character you want much quicker.

Code Pages Supported by EditPad Pro

EditPad Pro supports a very wide range of code pages used to save text files on Windows computers and other platforms. You can instantly convert a file between any two encodings by selecting Convert|Text Encoding in the menu, or re-interpret a file using a different encoding in case EditPad Pro's auto-detection fails. You can specify different default encodings for each file type.

Unicode

Unicode text files can store text in any language known to humanity. Modern globalized applications often use UTF-8 or UTF-16 to save text files.

UTF-8
UTF-16 little endian
UTF-16 big endian
UTF-32 little endian
UTF-32 big endian

All Windows (ANSI) Code Pages

Windows applications that don't use Unicode save text files using one of the Windows code pages, often called "ANSI" code pages in technical documentation for Windows. EditPad Pro supports all single byte (Western languages) and double byte (Far East languages) code pages, allowing you to open any text file created on a Windows computer.

Windows 1250: Central European
Windows 1251: Cyrillic
Windows 1252: Western European
Windows 1253: Greek
Windows 1254: Turkish
Windows 1255: Hebrew
Windows 1256: Arabic
Windows 1257: Baltic
Windows 1258: Vietnam
Windows 874: Thai
Windows 932: Japanese Shift-JIS
Windows 949: Korean
Windows 936: Simplified Chinese GBK
Windows 950: Traditional Chinese Big5

All ISO-8859 Code Pages

Applications that don't use Unicode running on Linux and other UNIX variants usually save text files using one of the ISO-8859 code pages. EditPad Pro supports all ISO-8859 code pages, allowing you to open any text file created on a Linux computer.

ISO-8859-1 Latin-1 Western European
ISO-8859-2 Latin-2 Central European
ISO-8859-3 Latin-3 South European
ISO-8859-4 Latin-4 North European
ISO-8859-5 Cyrillic
ISO-8859-6 Arabic
ISO-8859-7 Greek
ISO-8859-8 Hebrew
ISO-8859-9 Latin-5 Turkish
ISO-8859-10 Latin-6 Nordic
ISO-8859-11 Thai (TIS-620)
ISO-8859-13 Latin-7 Baltic Rim
ISO-8859-14 Latin-8 Celtic
ISO-8859-15 Latin-9
ISO-8859-16 Latin-10 South-Eastern European

DOS (ASCII) Code Pages

EditPad Pro supports a wide variety of code pages used by the legacy DOS operating systems like MS-DOS and PC-DOS. These code pages include the famous "box drawing symbols" used by text-based DOS applications to simulate graphical menus and windows.

DOS 437: United States
DOS 737: Greek
DOS 775: Baltic Rim
DOS 850: Western European
DOS 852: Central European
DOS 855: Cyrillic
DOS 857: Turkish
DOS 860: Portuguese
DOS 861: Icelandic
DOS 862: Hebrew
DOS 863: Canadian French
DOS 864: Arabic
DOS 865: Nordic
DOS 866: Cyrillic Russian
DOS 869: Greek 2

KOI8 Code Pages

The KOI8 encodings are very popular for encoding Russian text files. If you receive files with text in Russian, they're likely to be encoded in KOI8 rather than in Windows 1251 or ISO-8859-5.

KOI8-R: Russian
KOI8-U: Ukranian

EBCDIC

The EBCDIC encodings were the de facto standard when computer files were saved on punch cards, and are still used by mainframe systems from IBM and other vendors. EditPad Pro supports the more commonly used EBCDIC encodings.

EBCDIC 037: US & Canada
EBCDIC 424: Hebrew
EBCDIC 500: International
EBCDIC 875: Greek
EBCDIC 1026: Turkish

Convert your text files from any encoding to any other one. The screen shot shows Japanese, English and Thai text encoded as UTF-8 Unicode. Conversion to the legacy Thai code page would lose the Japanese characters.

"I am trying out EditPad Pro, and I have to say that I like it a lot - it's the best, most customizable, and the fastest general Unicode text editor I've used, and I've tried many different ones."

-- Frank Lin
14 February 2007, USA

File type text encoding settings

"I've been using EditPad for several years now, and it has always been my favorite plain text editor. And since I often need to read files using different code pages, or convert between them, I'm very glad of the new Unicode capabilities of EditPad 6.0.0 (especially since they're also available on Windows 98!). I'm certainly going to use EditPad even more than before. Thank you very much, and keep up the good work"!

-- Marcin Grzegorczyk
8 June 2006, Poland

A Truly International Text Editor

It's no surprise that EditPad Pro is one of the few Windows text editors that you can use to edit text files in any language or script. While most text editors boldly advertise Unicode support, they often have trouble with anything outside the repertoire of Western European characters familiar to American programmers.

EditPad Pro is the brainchild of Jan Goyvaerts, who grew up in Belgium, a small country in Europe. At school Jan had to study Belgium's three official languages (Dutch, French and German), as well as English. Nowadays, Jan lives in Thailand, with its unique script that writes vowels around the consonants in all four directions, rather than just from left to right. Obviously, he wants his text editor to work perfectly with all these languages.

You Need EditPad™ Pro To Edit Text Files

Page URL: http://www.editpadpro.com/unicode.html
Page last updated: 11 December 2007
Site last updated: 04 May 2008

Powerful Unicode Text EditorEdit Text Files in Any Language, Script or Code Page