At first glance text files may seem very easy to edit and display. After all, even Windows Notepad can handle the key basics. If you’ve ever tried to view or edit a Unicode file, though, one which uses a different character set to your own, then you’ll know it can be surprisingly difficult – unless you turn to a specialist tool, like BabelPad.

As you’d expect, the program offers support for opening files in more than 60 encodings: Arabic, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and more, they’re all here. So if you’re just looking for a way to display a file as the author intended, BabelPad will do the trick.

There are also some powerful features on offer, though. Like BabelPad’s ability to assign different fonts to individual scripts, helping you to more easily work with multi-script files.

The program can handle multiple scripts in the same document

Elsewhere, the program also provides input methods which allow you to enter a variety of scripts: Tibetan, Manchu, Mongolian, Uyghur and Yi (Nuosu), as well as the ability to manually enter Unicode characters by entering their hexadecimal values. You can switch between left-to-right and right-to-left page layouts in a couple of clicks, and the use of Microsoft’s Uniscribe rendering engine ensures everything looks as it should.

And whether you’re working on an important contract in Vietnamese, or just writing a shopping list in English, BabelPad has plenty of editing features to help you out: there’s optional auto-indent, powerful find and replace, drag-and-drop support (select some text and you can drag and drop it anywhere else in the document), multi-level undo and redo, and more.

Even if you only very occasionally need to work on Unicode files, then, there may be other reasons to keep BabelPad around. Especially as it’s free, and comes in the form of a single executable file. Give the program a try, or if you’re really living on the edge, check out the beta version which supports Unicode 6.2 (final release expected in September or October).