Text Encodings specify the format in which text documents are saved to a disk. For documents that contain only English characters and standard punctuation symbols, the "Plain Text (ASCII)" encoding is usually the best choice. This encoding is compatible with web browsers without needing to be declared. UTF-8 is often a good encoding choice for documents that contain international characters or special punctuation. When UTF-8 is used in an HTML document, the encoding must be declared to the web browser for it to render correctly. This can be done by including the following <meta>
tag at the beginning of your document within the head section:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
Default Encodings for Opening and Saving
In the "Documents" section of Taco HTML Edit's Preferences, you can specify default encodings for opening and saving files. Selecting "Automatic" will mean that Taco HTML Edit will attempt to automatically determine the encoding of a document when it is opened, based on document metadata and statistical analysis of the document's contents. If this is not producing the desired results (i.e. you see strange characters when opening a document), you may need to specify the encoding to use. This can be done with the Preferences setting or with
document-specific settings.
Taco HTML Edit also includes a Preference option for the default text encoding for saving files. This value will be used by default when saving an untitled document for the first time. When saving existing documents, the encoding for saving defaults to the encoding that was used when opening the document. See Document-Specific Encodings for information on how to change the encoding of an existing document.
Document-Specific Encodings
The Open and Save panels in Taco HTML Edit both allow an encoding to be selected that is different from the default value set in Taco HTML Edit's Preferences. If you want to select an encoding that will always be used for a specific document, open the document and then select "Get Info" from the "File" menu. The "Get Info" panel allows an encoding to be selected, which will then become the new default for that document.