VietPad

VietPad is a straightforward and practical application designed for those who want to create documents in both English and Vietnamese with ease. The tool supports special characters (diacritics) and entry methods, such as VNI, VIQR and Telex, without the need of other external tools like keyboard drivers.

The program comes packed in a small archive with all the necessary files, which can be copied to an external drive and run from any computer. VietPad comes with SmartMark function, which lets you enter diacritical marks at the end of words. In order for the tool to start, you need to have Java installed on the hard drive or at least updated.

It's wrapped in a well-structured and accessible layout that provides a few custom themes to choose from, a simple editor and a standard toolbar packed with the most common commands, like undo, search and spell check. At the bottom of the window, you can view the interface language that can be easily changed and the input method.

To create a new file, simply start typing your thoughts or use the copy, cut and paste elements to quickly enter content from another document. To fix mistakes, you can use the undo and redo actions to go back to the previous text. Unfortunately, only the date and time can be inserted, as VietPad doesn't offer an option to add images, tables or choose a specific paragraph alignment.

It's possible to pick particular font types, sizes and colors, enable word wrap, remove line breaks and change the case (e.g. lowercase, uppercase, titlecase). You can easily switch between English and Vietnamese keyboard mode, select the input method and disable SmartMark. The tools menu comes with a spellchecker, text conversion to Unicode and VIQR, as well as add, strip and normalize diacritics.

The bottom line is that VietPad is a reliable application that to help those who need a simple yet feature-rich editor to write and edit various documents in both English and Vietnamese and easily choose the keyboard mode.