TextPad and Unicode: full support?

Question

I've got some UTF-8 files created in Mac, and when trying to open them using TextPad in Windows, I get the following warning:

WARNING: (file name) contains characters that do not exist in code page 1252 (ANSI Latin 1). They will be converted to the system default character, if you click OK.

Linux (GNOME gEdit) can open the same file without complaints. What does the above mean? I thought that TextPad had full UTF-8 support. Can I safely open and edit UTF-8 files using it without corrupting the file?

Answer 1

TextPad ‘supports’ UTF-8 and UTF-16 documents only in as much as it will import and export them. But it still edits files as simple bytes, and not Unicode characters (using the ANSI code page, which is code page 1252 for Western European).

So unless the file happened to contain only characters that also exist in that code page, you will lose content. This rather defeats the point of Unicode.

Indeed, this was the issue that made me flee—to EmEditor, at the time, though now I would agree with the previous comments and recommend Notepad++. The era of paying for text editors is long gone.