[OS X TeX] Re: Latexian 1.0 Released

[Herbert Schulz]

On Dec 9, 2010, at 10:37 AM, Alain Matthes wrote:

> Le 9 déc. 2010 à 16:59, Herbert Schulz a écrit :
>> 
>> Howdy,
>> 
>> It has nothing to do with what is ``best'' (in the eyes of the beholder) but a fact of life that people use all sorts of editors and many of them, either from age or by design, don't ``know'' utf-8 and most of those folks have no idea what input encoding even is. It's all well and nice if someone sends you a latin1 encoded file and you translate it to utf-8 but what happens when you send it back to them and they open it up in their editor and get what appears like garbage? Remember collaboration is a two way street.
> 
> Yes you are right but normally if an editor "understands" encoding, I think it knows that the encoding is latin1
> and when you save  the file It uses the same encoding.
> Perhaps, it's not so easy ... and insecure so it's for that % !TEX encoding = IsoLatin at the beginning of the file is more sure!
> 
> Best  regards
> 
> Alain matthes

Howdy,

Many older files from Textures, etc., used applemac encoding so you need to take that into account to get those folks up and running as quickly as possible. Of course it is possible to change the default to Latin1, UTF-8, etc., but if you collaborate with other folks, even if they are all using TeXshop, you can't guarantee that will be the setting of their editor.

While some editors do a very good job of guessing the encoding being used I'm not at all sure there is a guaranteed way of ``seeing'' UTF-8.

Good Luck,

Herb Schulz
(herbs at wideopenwest dot com)