Nick Payne <[email protected]> writes: > On 19/10/11 05:09, GRAEME F ST CLAIR wrote: >> General reply to Messrs Rogers, Peekay and Kastrup! >> >> In the end I googled lilypond and found the \char approach myself. >> Right now, I'm settling for it, because as DK hints, both TextPad >> and jEdit will save UTF-8 just fine, but the next time you open the >> file, you see mysterious blobs, not the intended character. That's >> why I committed "mangling" on my previous project! >> >> But I intend to re-visit some German songs I lily'ed a few years >> ago, and obviously \char won't really hack it - I like the >> suggestion of Emacs, and will go looking for it. > > jEdit works fine for me on both Linux and Windows in preserving > extended characters across editing sessions. Just open Global Options > from the Utilities menu and make sure that under encodings the default > character encoding is UTF-8.
Most editors should preserve text when you edit in the correct encoding. The advantage of Emacs is that it is rather good at preserving the _byte_ stream of unedited text even when in the wrong encoding (Emacs actually also is rather good at detecting the coding of a file, so you are not all that likely to even start creating mish-mash files even if you don't realise that somebody sent you something differently encoded from what you expect). So if you edit a file as utf-8 and have some latin-1 passages in it originally, the latin-1 passages will still be the same when you open the file as latin-1, or finally discover them and use M-x recode-region RET on them, telling Emacs that the characters were really latin-1 and wrongly interpreted as utf-8. Other editors turn latin-1 passages into increasingly unrecoverable crap each time you load and save under utf-8. The wrongness of the encoding _deteriorates_. If your file is encoded inconsistently in different parts, Emacs can't magically fix this, but it won't make the situation worse. And that is quite comforting. -- David Kastrup _______________________________________________ lilypond-user mailing list [email protected] https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user
