I'm another Textpad user looking to solve problems that have been shelved for so long there.

In my case, it's Unicode support and I am pleased to note that Twistpad can open and edit the files I have to deal with.

I note a problem, however, with Khmer, the language that's brought me here.

Khmer is a character-syllable language (eg, like English and unlike Japanese), but words are not separated by spaces. (Instead, spaces act something like commas.)

In a program like OpenOffice or Microsoft Word, when you toggle "show invisibles" and non-printing characters are displayed, the zero-width space [1] that Khmer Unicode users insert between words is among those characters shown.

Twistpad not only doesn't show these nonprinting characters, when I copied text containing them and saved it, the ZWSP characters were removed.

Hope you can get this straightened out.

Thanks,

Roger Sperberg

PS: A couple of related UI requests -- toggling back and forth between showing and hiding invisibles is a frequent action in what I do. It would be nice to have a button to click for that.

It would also be nice to be able to specify different fonts and sizes for Western characters and Khmer (eg, Unicode 1780-17FF). Khmer can stack four or more characters and diacritic marks on top of each other, so the fonts usually make the base character pretty small. And I need them big, because I'm not so good at recognizing them. But I don't want to work in 20-point letters in English. :-) I know that Firefox provides this, to name one program. I don't know what it would take to add to Twistpad, but it makes for much easier character-by-character and word-by-word work.

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[1] Unicode character 200B.

Hi,

I have to admit I've never heard about the Khmer language before.
Any chance you can send a sample document? I'm intrigued with it since it does not use spaces. I wonder if any special font is necessary to use it?

Since I know little about this, I cannot help you much more until doing some tests, however bear in mind that Unicode support in Twistpad has some limitations (no spell check support, no sort support, etc) This is basically because the language used to build Twistpad has limited support for Unicode, making it difficult to properly support Unicode in all it's differences between languages.

If possible send the sample file to support@carthagosoft.net

Thanks,

André Santos
Carthago Software Support
http://www.carthagosoft.net

Implementing Khmer is definitely not as easy as many other languages, that's for sure.

Windows Vista includes support for Khmer, I've read, but for XP you have to go through several steps to read and keyboard Khmer:

1) Go to the Khmer Software Initiative site (khmeros.info) and download then install the Khmer Unicode package.

2) Make sure you have a recent enough version of the usp10.dll from Microsoft. This comes with Office and some other apps, but isn't directly available from MS. You can get it at khmercenter.ch. There's a "gotcha" with this file -- I had, it turns out, 5 versions of it on my computer [1] and sometimes the app I was using would use an old one, while another would use a new one. You have to replace or remove old ones.

3) After reflecting on this, I think you need to reverse steps 2) and 1) -- in order to replace the version of usp10.dll in \windows\system, you need to point to the newer version during the Khmer Unicode installation.

The installation package installs a driver, a keyboard layout and several Unicode fonts (khmeros, khmeros system, khmeros freehand and khmeros fasthand are the ones I use; you might not want to keep the others). The instructions tell you what to do in Windows to install another keyboard; in XP, you end up using the "Catalan" (CA) slot. And then pressing Shift-Alt switches you between the English and Khmer keyboards, allowing you to enter text.

Hm-m. Even though I've pasted in Khmer text into Twistpad earlier, I can't seem to get it to enter in Khmer. I have the encoding set to utf-8 and the font set to KhmerOS.

Entering a new character simply shows a "?", even though other Khmer characters are displayed. Now I'm really confused.

Maybe I'd better let you get the font and keyboard installed and then you could explain why the characters can be pasted but not entered. I haven't encountered this before -- it's either all or nothing with other apps I've tried.

Thanks,

Roger Sperberg

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[1] For instance, Google Earth installed a version.