Converting non-UTF-8 text files

From NeoWiki

UTF-8 is the standard encoding for all text entered into NeoOffice (as well as in Mac OS X and most modern applications on other platforms).

Sometimes you need to work with files in "legacy" ISO, Mac, or Windows encodings. If the file is a "plain text" file (as opposed to "styled text" like RTF, .doc, or other "binary" text file formats), or if you can save the document in a plain text format, you can make NeoOffice convert the file to UTF-8.

Importing the non-UTF-8 file

• Choose Open…" from the File menu
• In the "File type" drop-down, select "Text Encoded (*.txt)" near the bottom of the section of text/word processing documents
• Select the file encoded in ISO-8859-1 (or your encoding, of course)
• In the resulting "ASCII Filter Options" dialogue, choose "Western Europe (ISO-8859-1)" (or the appropriate encoding for your text file) in the "Character set" drop-down

  If you intend to use this document in NeoOffice, be sure to choose the appropriate language, as well (to ensure spell-check works, among others)

Exporting the file as UTF-8

• Choose Save As… from the File menu
• In the "File type" drop-down, select "Text Encoded (*.txt)" near the bottom of the list
• Check the "Edit filter settings" checkbox
• Enter the new filename and hit return
• Press "Yes" to dismiss the "may loose formatting" dialogue (if enabled)
• In the resulting "ASCII Filter Options" dialogue, choose "Unicode (UTF-8)" in the "Character set" drop-down
• Finish saving and all is OK

A bit complicated, but it works fine. Those encoding problems are frequent and boring for non-English speakers (writers…). You can do this conversion in TextEdit, but I wanted to use Neo and only Neo.