BabelPad Features

Summary of Features

User Interface

• Swap between Edit Mode and Browser Mode :
  • Edit Mode allows documents of any size to be edited in plain text format.
  • Browser Mode allows the current document to be viewed in an Internet Explorer browser window.
• The user interface menus and other text elements may be displayed in any of the following languages :
  • English
  • Chinese (simplified)
  • Chinese (traditional)
• Multiple instances of BabelPad may be tiled (horizontally, vertically or patchwork), cascaded, minimized, maximized, restored or closed from the "Window" menu of any open BabelPad window.

File Features

• Open files encoded in a wide range of Unicode and legacy encodings (full list of supported encodings).
• Autodetects Unicode encoding forms and character sets declared in HTML or XML documents.
• Automatically convert CR/LF, CR, LF, Line Separator and Paragraph Separator characters.
• Option to convert Numeric Character References (NCR) and/or Universal Character Names (UCN) to Unicode characters on Open.
• Save the current document as :
  • Unicode : UTF-8 (with or without a Byte Order Mark)
  • Unicode : UTF-16 Big Endian or Little Endian (with or without a Byte Order Mark)
  • Unicode : UTF-32 Big Endian or Little Endian (with or without a Byte Order Mark)
  • GB18030 (with or without a Byte Order Mark)
  • ASCII with Hexadecimal Numeric Character Reference (NCR) substitution of non Basic Latin characters
  • ASCII with Decimal Numeric Character Reference (NCR) substitution of non Basic Latin characters
  • ASCII with Universal Character Name (UCN) substitution of non Basic Latin characters
  • ASCII with HTML Entity substitution of non Basic Latin characters
  • SCSU (Standard Compression Scheme for Unicode) [encoder/decoder code kindly supplied by Doug Ewell]
• Save line breaks as CR/LF, LF, CR, or as Unicode Line Separator [U+2028] or Paragraph Separator characters [U+2029].

Edit Features

• Left-To-Right (LTR) or Right-To-Left (RTL) page layout.
• Line Wrap mode or No Line Wrap mode.
• Drag and Drop editing.
• Multiple Undo/Redo.
• Indent and Unindent selected lines of text using TAB and Shift-TAB.
• Option to Auto-Indent text as you type (useful for writing code).
• Select a "word" by double-clicking and navigate by "word" by means of the left/right arrows (works for most Unicode scripts).
• Select a line of text by left-clicking in the margin (select a paragraph by double-clicking in the margin).
• Find and Replace functions.
• Supports preferred font family and subfamily for font families with more than four font styles.
• Load uninstalled font files from file for use in the current instance of BabelPad only.
• Quick highlight all occurences of a character, word or phrase (or any arbitrary text) by right-clicking on selected text and selecting 'Highlight'.
• Highlight an arbitrary number of characters, words or phrases (or any arbitrary text) in user-specified colours by loading a highlighting definition file.
• Sorting using the Unicode Collation Algorithm (UCA) or the CLDR Collation Algorithm, with custom tailorings for some languages, including Tibetan.
• Manipulate delimited columns of text (reorder, cut, copy, paste and sort columns delimited by tabs or any user-specified character or string).
• Transcode from one list of characters or code points to another list of characters or code points
• Batch replace one list of text strings with another list of text strings
• Select default font and font size from dropdown list on the toolbar.
• Configure individual Unicode blocks to always use a particular font regardless of which font is currently selected for default display.
• Status Bar displays code point and Unicode name of the character at the current caret position.
• For CJK ideographs the status bar also displays the Mandarin, Korean or Vietnamese reading for the character at the current caret position (choice of reading is user-selectable).
• Able to open and edit very large (multi-megabyte) files with little degredation in performance.
• Standard printing functionality enabled.

Text Conversion

• Case Conversion (covering all scripts that have upper/lower case distinctions, including Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Armenian and Deseret) :
  • Convert the selected alphabetic text to upper case.
  • Convert the selected alphabetic text to lower case.
  • Convert the selected alphabetic text to title case.
• Normalization (conforms to the Unicode 9.0 normalization algorithm) :
  • Convert the selected text to Normalization Form NFD (cannonical decomposition).
  • Convert the selected text to Normalization Form NFC (cannonical composition).
  • Convert the selected text to Normalization Form NFKD (cannonical decomposition with compatibility characters replaced).
  • Convert the selected text to Normalization Form NFKC (cannonical composition with compatibility characters replaced).
  • Options to customize normalization for Hebrew and Tibetan, to avoid suboptimal reordering of characters.
• CJK Conversion :
  • Convert the selected Simplified Chinese text to Traditional Chinese.
  • Convert the selected Traditional Chinese text to Simplified Chinese.
• Entity Conversion :
  • Convert all HTML Entities (e.g. ü) in the selected text to Unicode characters.
  • Convert all non-Basic Latin characters in the selected text to HTML Entities or hexadecimal Numeric Character References (NCRs).
  • Convert all Numeric Character References (e.g. ü or ü) in the selected text to Unicode characters.
  • Convert all non-Basic Latin characters in the selected text to hexadecimal Numeric Character References (NCRs).
  • Convert all non-Basic Latin characters in the selected text to decimal Numeric Character References (NCRs).
  • Convert all Universal Character Names (e.g. \u00FC) in the selected text to Unicode characters.
  • Convert all non-Basic Latin characters in the selected text to Universal Character Names (UCNs).
  • Convert all characters in the selected text to their Unicode Names (e.g. LATIN SMALL LETTER U WITH DIAERESIS).
  • Convert the selected Unicode character name to its corresponding character
  • Convert all characters in the selected text to U+XXXX notation (e.g. U+00FC).
  • Convert hexadecimal scalar value in front of the caret to a Unicode character or vice versa by hitting Alt-X (emulates the ALt-X functionality in Micrososft Word).
• Transliteration Conversion :
  • Convert the selected CJK text to Mandarin pinyin readings.
  • Convert the selected CJK text to Cantonese jyutping readings.
  • Convert the selected Extended Wylie Tibetan transliteration to Unicode Tibetan.
  • Convert the selected Mongolian transliteration to Unicode Mongolian.
  • Convert the selected Manchu transliteration to Unicode Manchu.
  • Convert the selected Yi romanisation to Unicode Yi.
  • Convert the selected Yi romanisation to International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).
  • Convert the selected Unicode Yi text to Yi romanisation.
  • Convert the selected Unicode Yi text to International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).
  • Convert the selected Vietnamese Unicode text to VIQR transliteration.
  • Convert the selected VIQR transliteration to Vietnamese Unicode.
• PUA Conversion :
  • Convert precomposed Tibetan (SetA) to standard Unicode Tibetan.
  • Convert standard Unicode Tibetan to precomposed Tibetan (SetA).
  • Convert Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set (HKSCS) PUA characters to CJK Unified Ideograph characters.
• Reordering :
  • Reverse the order of all selected characters in a line.

Rendering Features

• Utilises Microsoft's Uniscribe rendering engine to correctly render complex text.
• Option to render all Unicode characters as individual spacing glyphs (i.e. with no shaping or ligation of complex text, and combining characters not combined).
• Option to display text in different colours for different Unicode-defined scripts.

Input Methods

• Select any installed Windows Keyboard Layout or IME from a dropdown list on the toolbar.
• Romanised input methods for the following scripts :
  • Tibetan — using the Tibetan & Himalayan Digital Library [THDL] Extended Wylie Transcription System [EWTS]
  • Manchu — using modified Möllendorff transliteration, as documented on Wikipedia : Transliterations of Manchu)
  • Mongolian
  • Uyghur — using Uyghur Latin Yëziqi (ULY)
  • Yi (Nuosu) — using Liangshan Yi Phonetic Alphabet
• Unicode Input Mode :
  • Enter Unicode characters in the range U+0001 through U+10FFFF as scalar hexadecimal values (with or without leading zeros), demarcated by pressing the Space or Return key.
  • Select One-off Unicode Input Mode by pressing Ctrl+Q (this allows you to enter a single Unicode character as described above, but on pressing Space, Enter or Escape you are returned to the original keyboard/IME).

Tools and Utilities

• Fonts Overview Utility : lists essential details for all enumerated TrueType and OpenType fonts.
• Font Analysis Utility : lists all Unicode blocks covered by a particular font or lists all fonts that cover a particular Unicode block.
• Font Information Utility : provides information about the currently selected font.
• Font Glyph Export Utility : export any or all glyphs from any font to file in BMP, GIF, JPG or PNG format (optionally specify which characters to export the glyphs for by loading a glyph export definition file).
• Font Coverage Utility : List all fonts that cover a particular character or all the characters in a piece of text or all the characters in the BabelMap edit buffer.
• Advanced Character Search Utility : lists all characters that meet specified criteria.
• UCD Data Utility : generates UCD-format data for a given range of characters for any version of Unicode.
• Character History Utility : enumerates the UCD properties for a given character for all versions of Unicode, including mappings to Unicode 1.0.0 and 1.0.1 where appropriate.
• Han Radical Lookup Utility : lists all Han ideographs with a given radical and number of strokes (covers all 74,616 characters in the CJK, CJK-A, CJK-B, CJK-C and CJK-D blocks).
• Mandarin Pinyin Lookup Utility : lists all Han ideographs with a given Mandarin pinyin pronunciation.
• Cantonese Jyutping Lookup Utility : lists all Han ideographs with a given Cantonese jyutping pronunciation.
• Yi Radical Lookup Utility : lists all Yi syllables with a given radical and number of strokes.
• Unicode Version History Utility : provides a summary of the repertoire of each version of Unicode from 1.0 onwards.
• Document Analysis Utility : provides statistical information about the current document, and highlights any invalid characters.
• Character Frequency Utility : lists all the characters in the document by frequency.
• Undefined Glyphs Utility : lists all characters in the document which are rendered with an undefined glyph using the currently selected font (not available when the composite font is selected).

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