[OS X TeX] TeXShop encoding issue

[Rowland McDonnell]

>Rowland,
>
>If you open a file in TeXShop by double clicking or dragging to the
>TeXShop icon, it will open using the default encoding, set in TeXShop
>Preferences. I agree with others that you should use UTF-8 if you want
>to preserve a range of non-ASCII characters.
>
>If you open a file by using the TeXShop "Open" command, an "Open
>Dialog" will appear. If you select "Options" then you can select the
>encoding option you prefer for that one file.
>
>One caveat: most encodings are just long streams of bytes, and if one
>of these doesn't represent a character, you'll get a question mark.
>But UTF-8 is an encoding with "rules" and if you try to open a random
>stream of bytes, it will likely not follow the rules. Then the system
>cannot open the file with UTF-8, and will warn you and then default to
>something else.
>
>Dick Koch


Thank you to Stephen J Sangwine and Richard Koch: quite right, 
there are no curly quotes in Latin-9, which is a bit of a 
surprise.  For some reason, I'd assumed that Latin-9 - being the 
default encoding in TeXShop - was a good replacement for old 
fashioned Mac OS Roman encoding.  Perhaps it is for some uses, 
but seemingly not for mine.

I've tried UTF-8 and all is well.

Is there any good reason not to use UTF-8 by default for my 
LaTeX input files?

Thanks to all,
Rowland.



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