BabelMap is a character map application for Windows (95 through Vista) that allows you to browse through the entire Unicode character repertoire or search for a particular character by name or codepoint. Characters can then be copied to the clipboard for use in any Unicode-aware application. It also provides many useful features and special utilities, as described below.
Unlike most other character map applications, which are often limited to the repertoire of an old version of Unicode, BabelMap always supports the latest version of Unicode, currently Unicode 5.1.0 (released 2008-04-04). For example, whereas BabelMap supports all of the 100,000+ characters defined in Unicode 5.1, the Windows Character Map application in Windows Vista is still stuck in 1996, supporting only the limited repertoire of Unicode 2.0 (less than 40,000 characters).
BabelMap is free and fully functional, and there are no disabled features or time restrictions. If you have any feature requests or bug reports, please let me know.
Read the BabelStone Blog to keep informed about new versions of BabelMap and BabelPad.
Whilst BabelMap is free, if you do use it for commercial purposes, you are welcome to make a small donation (£5.00 or equivalent suggested) by means of PayPal to help support its continued development :
BabelMap includes the following utilities that may be accessed from the menu or by means of function keys :
BabelMap is distributed as a single executable (no installer). Simply download the appropriate zipped file for your operating system, and then unzip the file BabelMap.exe to the desired location on your computer.
Please note that the version for Windows 95, 98 and Me is not as good as the version for Windows 2000, XP and Vista (due to lack of native support for Unicode some features are disabled or limited), and depending on your system configuration it may or may not work as expected (in particular the character map grid may not display correctly on unmodfied W95 systems).
When running under Windows XP, please ensure that you have enabled Uniscribe for complex scripts by checking "Install support for complex scripts and right-to-left languages..." on the Languages tab of the Regional and Language Options of the Control Panel. If not enabled (which is the default for some bizzare reason), all characters beyond the Basic Multilingual Plane (i.e. all characters in the range U+10000 through U+10FFFF) may be displayed as two "not defined" glyphs in the edit buffer, even though they are displayed correctly in the character grid. Also some complex scripts, such as Mongolian and Tibetan, may not shape correctly.