Using Windows Notepad for non-english languages

Currently I am working on an assignment that involves updating a web site in 4 different languages (English, Chinese, Arabic and Spanish). The company provided all the translated documents. Now it was just matter of copy paste from non English documents to the pages. Well, that turned out to be a nightmare task for me because this was first time I was working with Arabic and Chinese language pages. I thought it would be simple task of cut and paste from Microsoft Word document to HTML editor for those pages. Well that did not work quite well because MS Word wants to copy its HTML tags as well. So I decided to use my good old technique of copy the text on to notepad and then from notepad to HTML editor. Well that did not go very well either because notepad could not render Arabic and Chinese text. And I was not in position to enable east asian language support on the machine.

Since Microsoft has done good job of updating very elementary tools like Paint so I thought of trying Notepad on my Windows 7 machine. And it worked like a charm. The notepad did render Chinese and Arabic text correctly. I could not thank Windows 7 enough to save my day.