BabelPad

BablePad is a full Unicode Text Editor.

Overview

BabelPad is a free Unicode text editor for Windows that supports the proper rendering of most complex scripts, and allows you to assign different fonts to different scripts in order to facilitate multi-script text editing. It also provides many useful features and special utilities for processing Unicode text. BabelPad supports the most recent version of the Unicode Standard, currently Unicode 9.0 (released June 2016).

Features

• Open files in a wide variety of Unicode or legacy encodings; save files in any Unicode encoding (UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32) or Unicode-compatible encoding (GB18030), or as ASCII text with escaped Unicode characters.
• Able to open and edit very large (multi-megabyte) files.
• Standard edit functionality, including drag-and-drop editing, multiple undo/redo, find and replace, and casing functions (for all casing scripts in Unicode).
• Left-To-Right (LTR) or Right-To-Left (RTL) page layout; and support for bidirectional text.
• Render text with either a single font or a user-defined composite font (where you can define which font to use for each Unicode block).
• Render complex Unicode scripts using Microsoft's Uniscribe rendering engine or Universal Shaping Engine (for Windows 10).
• Option to render all Unicode characters as individual spacing glyphs (i.e. with no shaping or joining of complex text).
• Option to display text in different colors for different Unicode-defined scripts.
• Convert Unicode text to/from a variety of escape codes (including converting to/from Unicode character names).
• Convert between Unicode characters and code points by pressing Alt-X after a character or at the end of a code point.
• Apply Unicode normalization (NFC, NFD, NFKC, NFKD) to text.
• Convert Chinese text between traditional and simplified character forms.
• Convert Chinese text to Mandarin pinyin readings.
• Convert Japanese text between old and new character forms.
• Convert between Vietnamese alphabet and VIQR.
• Convert Extended Wylie Tibetan transliteration into Unicode Tibetan characters.
• Convert between Yi (Nuosu) romanization and Unicode syllables.
• Sort text according to the Unicode Collation Algorithm (UCA) or the CLDR Collation Algorithm.
• 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
• Advanced character search utility which allows you to find all Unicode characters that match specified criteria.
• Character Map utility to find and enter any Unicode character.
• Special input methods for Manchu, Mongolian, Tibetan, Uyghur, and Yi (Nuosu) text.
• Character lookup tools for finding Han (CJKV) characters by radical/stroke or by Mandarin or Cantonese readings.
• Character lookup tool for finding Yi (Nuosu) characters by radical/stroke.
• Character lookup tool for finding Tangut characters by reference code.
• Various tools providing detailed information about Unicode versions, scripts, planes, blocks.
• Emoji data tool that lists data about all Unicode-defined emoji, and select single or composite emoji.
• Show all Unicode properties for the character at the current cursor position.
• Show additional non-Unicode data for Han (CJKV), Tangut and Egyptian Hieroglyph characters.
• Unicode code point and character name of character at the current cursor position is displayed on the status bar, with additional information for Han (CJKV) and Tangut characters.

Save formats

BabelPad can load more than 50 for different coding schemes for characters and language specific codes. It can save files in any of the following formats:

• Unicode : UTF-8
• Unicode : UTF-16
• Unicode : UTF-32
• GB18030 (Superset of GB2312 that maps to the entire Unicode code space)
• 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 (These are the \U followed by 4 or 8 hexadecimal digits designations.)
• ASCII with HTML Entity substitution of non Basic Latin characters
• SCSU (Standard Compression Scheme for Unicode)

Additional Information

• A help page for BabelPad
• This site also provides a Free BabelMap application that allows you to view a Table of Unicode symbols that can be selected to paste into another editor.
• The same sits also has MabelMap which allows users to select and paste characters in a wide variety of character sets.