Stijn
Member
Just installed this program, and I was quite surprised when I saw I have to pick a Code Page AND a Character Set.
As I understand it, both of those are encodings but with some differences.
So why do I have to pick one of each?
If I set the Code Page to UTF-8, then what should the Character Set be?
simon
PN Developer
The code page is used by Scintilla to work out how to handle the bytes representing the characters in the document - allowing the correct support of multi-byte characters. UTF-8 is automatically set when any unicode format document is used, and otherwise the value from the defaults page is used.
The character set chooses the character set to be used for displaying the actual text (as opposed to just understanding character boundaries). When not using unicode this defines which characters map to which byte values.
rc-flitzer
Member
Despite the naming of Scintilla, it would be a good idea to use the correct terms or to simplify the process of choosing an encoding.
Stijn asked which value he/she should use for "character set" when using UTF-8 encoding. From Simon's explanation I think it doesn't matter. But why not grey out the option when using UTF-8?
The terms code page, encoding, character set are somehow mixed. I would prefer using the term "encoding" instead of "code page". The term "character set" is okay though it's unneccessary when using Unicode (UTF-7, -8, -16, -32, UCS-2 (which is indeed a restriction to the first 65000 characters)).
BTW:
There is still no option to set the encoding when saving a file or otherwise change encoding without changing the file's content.
horus
Member
Sorry, but I'm another user who is also very confused by this and I don't really understand the subtlety. I've read the sentence "The character set chooses the character set to be used for displaying the actual text ..." ten times but still can't get a picture of it :p
For me and in general, the terms "code page", "character set" and "encoding" are synonyms. Having both things could lead to some meaningless combination. Let's take an example:
In Big5 (by the way, I've no idea why it's called *simple* Chinese, but that's another discussion), Hebrew characters are not represented in it. You could check that by looking up all supported characters in Big5 table:
http://www.khngai.com/chinese/charmap/tblbig.php?page=0
So, if I choose
Code Page: Simple Chinese Big5 & Character Set: Hebrew
This combination is meaningless.
Some other combinations don't quite make sense other, eg
Code Page: Simple Chinese Big5 & Character Set: Shift-JIS
or
Code Page: Simple Chinese Big5 & Character Set: Greek
because Big5 doesn't contain accentuated Greek characters. So, the word "colour" in Greek which is χρώμα (phonetically "chroma") is not possible as the character ώ isn't a member of Big5.
Could I suggest that "Code page" and "Character set" be merged as one option?
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