m.kornig@sondal.net wrote:
Currently, I use a simple text editor (it's actually bloc-notes) to create my HTML files. Can I still use this if I go for UTF8 or UTF16? And will the Japanese characters be distinguishable in the source file?
Vim has good UTF-8 support since version 6.0 (:set encoding=utf8); Emacs has support from 21.3 (prefer-coding-system utf-8 for global defaults, or modify-coding-system utf-8 for an individual file). Those are the only text editors that exist, right?
Now, mind you, if you had some program that claimed to be a text editor and which didn't have proper Unicode support, UTF-8 would look completely normal except for high characters (where it would depend on whether that program was UTF-8 aware -- which quite a lot is these days), whereas UTF-16 would be funky even for standard ASCII. Generally, it makes sense to use UTF-8 if a document is mostly low ASCII characters, or UTF-16 if it's mostly Unicode characters not found in low ASCII.
(bloc-notes is Notepad, right? I won't recognize its claim to text-editordom, but according to http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notepad, it *does* have both UTF-8 and UTF-16 support).