Not really surprising. Copying and pasting into vim is a no-go because the distributors of vim decided when they coded up a rip-off of the actual 'vi' command to add In UTF-8 support - even though the entire command-line terminal environment that vim is used in - is really an ASCII environment NOT a UTF-8 environment.
It's important to understand that vim IS NOT vi. This is a common misperception by newcomers to vi (which, in my personal option, is the greatest Text editor ever invented) There's 2 efforts out there that are as close as possible to the REAL vi code: https://ex-vi.sourceforge.net/ https://github.com/n-t-roff/heirloom-ex-vi I had intended you copy and paste into the GUI text editor that comes with Linux since you were copying and pasting from a web page - I had not assumed you were running the command-line version of a web browser :-) As you discovered notepadqq also supports the UTF-8 stuff but it at least understands when it writes out a textfile that "text" means ascii. There's an interesting discussion of the conversion problems here with some suggestions you could use at the command line: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/171832/converting-a-utf-8-file-to-ascii-best-effort One commentor recommended this program: https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/jammy/man1/konwert.1.html I know that this is going to sound terribly privileged and nationalistic but the fact is that the UNIX operating system was invented in the United States not in any other country, and the simple reality is that every other country has had the same access to electronics knowledge and scientific information since the invention of the vacuum tube - but every other government and culture on the fact of the Earth pretty much didn't value any of that "tech stuff" until AFTER us Americans invented it. And NOW, they all want a piece of the action. Well OK maybe if they all had valued open information, the free exchange of ideas, scientific advancement, much more than they valued dictatorial socio-religious crap used to tell people what to do and how to live and who to screw, then MAYBE they would have gotten to the digital age FIRST and then maybe us Americans would have to learn Chinese if we wanted to write software. (there's a reason the Americans using stone knives and bearskins made it to the moon and back and the Chinese today even though they manufacture tech that would knock 1969 NASA tech into a cocked hat - still haven't made it there) Get me drift, here? UTF-8 was tacked on to UNIX as a way of accommodating the rest of the world who frankly couldn't give a tinker's damn about the digital age - until we Americans started kicking their butts with it. So it's NEVER going to be completely fully integrated into the Linux experience the way ASCII is. If, you, Randall, are stuck having to deal with that interface of American computing to rest of the world computing - your going to always have to deal with this fundamental mismatch. What I find most interesting in all of this is that the tech types in the REST of the world fully accept this - THEY are NOT in general the ones complaining about the second-class citizen status of UTF-8. They know that they came second, they know they came in second because the majority of people in their culture don't value freedom of choice, and all that other stuff needed for scientific advancement, and they accept that their native languages play second fiddle to ASCII. They type "rm" and "ls" and all the other ASCII commands in UNIX/Linux without complaint, and they generally don't have a problem spending time on this conversion stuff...it's us Americans who are mostly bitching and complaining about it...not realizing that we won the digital war, here.... (hell, even Linus Torvalds gave up his Finnish citizenship and became a US citizen, that really ought to tell you something) Ted -----Original Message----- From: PLUG <[email protected]> On Behalf Of American Citizen Sent: Thursday, December 25, 2025 1:33 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [PLUG] Ascii versus UTF-8 woes Ted: I am using vim, but when I attempt to write the UTF-8 file which I saved from the internet browser cut and paste command, into ascii format, vim fails with a curious error vim command: :write ++enc=ASCII my_ascii_file.txt I get the following error: "my_ascii_file.txt" E513: Write error, conversion failed (make 'fenc' empty to override) WARNING: Original file may be lost or damaged don't quit the editor until the file is successfully written! Press ENTER or type command to continue And trying to internally set the values of encoding and file encoding seems to work :set encoding=ascii :set fileencoding=ascii except when you double check the encoding, it stays at utf-8 but the fileencoding appears to be changed to the new value=ascii But then when you attempt to overwrite the file or write to a new file, vim throws errors again "new_file.txt" E513: Write error, conversion failed (make 'fenc' empty to override) WARNING: Original file may be lost or damaged don't quit the editor until the file is successfully written! Press ENTER or type command to continue So I am unable to get linux vim version 9.1.83 to work to change the encoding. I had to actually use notepadqq to paste the browser text and then set the encoding to ascii and this seems to work. I suppose you could pipe the file and let tr strip off the non-ascii characters ??? But this means going back in and manually comparing the two files, to see how to fix the omitted characters (if possible) TexStudio crashed mysteriously when I turned off its internal file scanning so I had to set the option again. Supposedly there is some tex sty code which allows UTF-8 to be used in a tex file. And yes, my editor settings under TexStudio IS UTF-8 I already have used up at least an hour of time on this problem as iconv doesn't really change a pure ascii file into a UTF-8 file and vim was failing me. Randall On 12/25/25 11:28, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote: > Open the regular textedit, paste into there, save, open the saved file > in TexStudio > > Ted > > -----Original Message----- > From: PLUG <[email protected]> On Behalf Of American > Citizen > Sent: Wednesday, December 24, 2025 7:40 PM > To: Portland Linux/Unix Group <[email protected]> > Subject: [PLUG] Ascii versus UTF-8 woes > > Hi: > > I have a set of tex files which are in pure ascii format. Unfortunately when > I copy material from the internet (Mozilla Firefox browser) it is in UTF-8 > format, not ascii. This appears to be standard behavior for the internet > browsers. > > When I paste the material into the tex document (using TexStudio) the > paste goes okay. It only blows up when I try to save the newer file. > The > UTF-8 characters cannot be saved in ascii format and for some bizarre reason > Tex Studio wont' change the encoding to UTF-8 even though I have the option > set that the editor is working with UTF-8 character set. > > iconv won't work either, I do the "iconv -f ASCII -t UTF-8 input_file -o > output_file and the file remains ascii. > > Does anyone have an idea of how I can get TexStudio to wake up and change the > file encoding on the current ascii file to UTF-8? > > I cannot get iconv to change the ascii file to UTF-8, so I am stuck between > the devil and the deep blue sea. > > Randall > > >
