Textedit - character encoding conversion

Question

Textedit - character encoding conversion

From one of our websites, I have exported a CSV text file which seems to be encoded as "Windows Latin 1" in Textedit jargon. When I set Textedit to open the file with that character encoding, all is fine; however, I cannot save it to "Mac OS Roman" encoding.
Why not ?

Needless to say, I have not found how to open "Windows Latin 1" files in MS Excel 2004 (FR), but that is another question ...

Posted on Sep 26, 2005 9:15 PM

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Answer 1

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

122,210 points

Sep 27, 2005 4:38 AM in response to Rupert Barrow

however, I cannot save it to "Mac OS Roman" encoding. Why not?

Probably because MacRoman doesn't contain the characters you have used in your text.

It is best to avoid both of these platform specific encodings if you can, especially MacRoman, which is hardly used anywhere. The international standard equivalent is ISO-8859-1, and that is the best charset for any web site in English or W. European languages.

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Answer 2

Sep 28, 2005 4:17 PM in response to Tom Gewecke

Tom,

Thanks for your answer. In the French version of Textedit, here are the available character encodings (in preferences, used to define encoding on opening or saving a file) :
. Automatic
. Unicode (UTF-16)
. Unicode (UTF-8)
. Western (Mac OS Roman)
. Western (Windows Latin 1)
. Japanese (MacOS)
. Japanese (Shift JIS)
. Traditional Chinese (MacOS)
. Korean (MacOS)
. Simplified Chinese (MacOS)
. Chinese (GB 18030)

No sign of ISO-8859-1. I have always presumed that it was the same thing as Windows Latin 1 : am I right ?
In any case, when I set Textedit to open my file in Windows Latin 1, I get the same strange characters in textedit as I do in Excel when I open the file. A counter example is when I set Textedit to open in UTF8, I get different strange characters from Excel.

My question is still : how do I get Textedit to transform/save the character encoding to get this text file to open correctly in Excel ?

Just for fun, the answer from MS support is : download NeoOffice to open the file, save it with different character encoding, then open it in Excel !!!

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Answer 3

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

122,210 points

Sep 28, 2005 4:36 PM in response to Rupert Barrow

Rupert -- If you go to the bottom of the list of encodings in TextEdit, you will find the "customize" choice, where you can add other encodings. ISO-8859-1 is called Western (ISO Latin 1) and is different from Windows Latin-1. This site provides some info (win latin 1 is called ANSI here):

http://www.alanwood.net/demos/charsetdiffs.html

It is hard to know what the particular problem with your file might be. I'm not sure what Excel might be using -- could also possibly be a variety of UTF-16. Send me a screenshot if you like. Click on my name for the address.

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