Unicode Tutorials - Herong's Tutorial Notes
Dr. Herong Yang, Version 5.00

What Is Notepad?

This section provides a quick introduction of the default text editor, Notepad, included in Windows system. Notepad does support Unicode text files.

What Is Notepad? Notepad is text file editor included in Windows systems. The Help > Help Topics menu of the Notepad version on my Windows XP system gives me the following overview of Notepad:

Notepad is a basic text editor that you can use to create simple documents. The most common use for Notepad is to view or edit text (.txt) files, but many users find Notepad a simple tool for creating Web pages.

Because Notepad supports only very basic formatting, you cannot accidentally save special formatting in documents that need to remain pure text. This is especially useful when creating HTML documents for a Web page because special characters or other formatting may not appear in your published Web page or may even cause errors.

You can save your Notepad files as Unicode, ANSI, UTF-8, or big-endian Unicode. These formats provide you greater flexibility when working with documents that use different character sets.

The Help > About Notepad menu gives me the version number: Version 5.1. See the picture below:
Notepad Version

Sections in This Chapter

What Is Notepad?

Opening UTF-8 Text Files

Opening UTF-16BE Text Files

Opening UTF-16LE Text Files

Saving Files in UTF-8 Option

Byte Order Mark (BOM) - FEFF - EFBBBF

Saving Files in "Unicode Big Endian" Option

Saving Files in "Unicode" Option

Supported Save and Open File Formats

Dr. Herong Yang, updated in 2009
What Is Notepad?