Chinese Translation by Notepad??

This has been one of the hack/bug in Notepad and is creating a lot of discussions in the technical community and blogosphere. A link to discussion on this was posted to the internal MVP list by a fellow MVP and I found it quite interesting.

For those who are not familiar with this bug try the following:

1. Open Notepad and type a sentence like this “this app can fails” or any 4-3-3-5 character based sentence. (People are having fun with all kind of sentences here)
2. Save this to a files somewhere
3. Open up this file again.

If you have support for Far-Eastern languages installed, then you will get something like this “扡摣愠换愠换愠换敤”. Of course the string will be different based on what you enter, but still it is not in English for sure..:)

This is actually due to the way Notepad handles encoding and if you want more information, Kaplan has a post on why this happens. Raymond also has a post on the basic problem that results in this.

Posted from Microsoft Word 2007 Beta 2