Hi everyone,

This is going to be a weird question -- and I'm not very tech-smart about this sort of thing... I've been trying to work on some HTML coding that I'd previously done on my age-old PC on my new Mac (in TextEdit). The thing is, it automatically saves plain text encoding as 'Western (Mac OS Roman)', and when I try to preview the coding on my Mac, I see Chinese characters! So I figured the system must be detecting the code was written on PC and there are some conversion/translation issues. I start to write original code on the Mac and save it, and the encoding switches to 'Unicode (UTF-16), which is good because then I DON'T get Chinese characters. But sometimes, if I want to work on code created on Mac, it will somehow default back to the 'Western...' encoding and of course, the characters come up again. I try other types of encoding offerred in the menu and it just makes code visible, etc. So the file becomes screwed and I cannot get it back to normal (showing as an HTML page should). Does anybody know of this predicament? And a short fix? It's very annoying! I just want it all to save as the same encoding!

Much thanks in advance!!!
s

If this is the TextEdit to which you're referring (http://www.apple.com/education/accessibility/technology/textedit.html), you may want to try a different program (a text-only editor) as it looks like a generic word processor, which tend to add additional formatting instead of outputting pure text. If it does handle plain text well, then there may be an option in the preferences for a default character encoding or set.

Generally, when you're creating (X)HTML files, it's recommended that you use UTF-8 or -16 (without byte order mark) for broadest compatibility. ISO-8895-1 is also fairly common if you only need a Latin character code page.

Thank you!!

I believe that's it! Are there any other text-only editors for Mac?

No problem! I'm afraid I have a pathetically small amount of experience on the Mac platform, so the best I can do for you is to point you in the direction of a Google Search query (http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=mac+text+editor). Hopefully, other, more knowledgeable members will have more information if you need it.