[XeTeX] Use of BOM in XeTeX and TeXworks

[Manfred Lotz]

On Wed, 10 Jul 2019 11:05:46 +0000
"Taylor, P" <P.Taylor at rhul.ac.uk> wrote:

> Two related questions, the second dependent on the answer to the
> first.
> 
>   1.  Is XeTeX happy with a BOM in UTF-8 files

Nowadays, usage of BOM for UTF-8 is neither required nor recommended.


>   2.  Could TeXworks be enhanced to (a) recognise, and (b) insert if
> absent, a BOM in UTF-8 files ?
> 
> The reason for my request is that while, on a day-to-day basis, I
> work solely in UTF-8, I have a suite of legacy (ISO-8859-1) files on
> which I need to continue to work.  No matter whether I configure
> TeXworks to operate by default in UTF-8 or ISO-8859-1, there
> invariably comes a time when I open a file of the other type, make a
> change (without noticing that some of the on-screen characters are
> wrong) and attempt to compile.  At that point, the file is saved with
> the wrong encoding, and unless I have an archival copy, all is lost.
> 

Does it mean that when you setup texworks encoding to be UTF-8, and
subsequently load an ISO-8859-1 file texworks doesn't recognize the
proper encoding?

I know it doesn't help you but vim, for instance, recognizes the
encoding of a loaded file although I have configured the default
encoding as UTF-8


-- 
Manfred