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I always find myself in need of a text editor in which one can enable or disable the rendering of diacritics together with base letters, so that all characters can also be seen isolated. I got the recommendation recently of using BabelPad:
https://www.babelstone.co.uk/Software/BabelPad.html
BabelPad includes the option to “render all Unicode characters as individual spacing glyphs (i.e. with no shaping or joining of complex text)”. The only problem of BabelPad is that it is only supported by Windows, but I managed to make it work in Linux using wine. So if anyone also needs this functionality, this editor is perfect.
When there are two possible codifications for a base grapheme and a diacritic, i.e. using one Unicode code point or two code points, normally they cannot be distinguished visually in the font rendering. With an individual and unidirectional rendeding for each character this can be distinguised straight away. For example, for alif + hamza below you could use U+0625 or U+0627 + U+0655. And also for building regular expressions that contain diacritics and also bidirectional text, specially together with mirroring caracters such as brackets.
This is what I mean: in the image of the right there is an alif and then a subscript hamza, whereas in the image of the left there is just one character, which is an alif with a hamza below. This is a screenshot from BabelPad with the option of showing all characters seperated. In a normal editor both encodings would be seen as in the image of the left.
Actually, I am looking for a good text editor for Arabic anyways. It’s a very basic question, but MS Word always crashes with larger text files, the Text Editor on Mac is not always reliable in displaying the text in RTL (right-to-left) and Sublime Text is great because you can see exactly what the computer is seeing but it is completely impossible to read. Are you saying that BabelPad is the way to go?
I guess I just need to check it out! Thanks for the hint!
I think BabelPad is a good option if you just care about seeing the text properly, so if you don’t need to do any formatting. I use myslef sublime, but in one of the last releases they implemented the bidirectional algorithm and I cannot use it anymore. Anyway, that means that Arabic is supposed to be seen ok now. You also have Visual Studio Code. That is also a good option.
But in case you need to see the characters separated, as I explained before, BabelPad.
Do you know Keyman Desktop (https://keyman.com/desktop/)?
It is not properly a text editor, but a keyboard mapper. It is powerful and multiplatform (Windows, Mac and Linux)
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