It also provides many useful features and special utilities, as described below. BabelPad supports the most recent version of the Unicode Standard, currently Unicode 6.2 (released September 2012).
Summary of Features
- 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 :
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Tools and Utilities
- 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.
- 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).