> A ideal interface should probably automatically and silently select > Unicode > (and its default UTF) whenever one or more of the characters in a document > are not representable in the local encoding.
I beg to differ. Silently doing such an unexpected change is guaranteed to confuse the user, especially as she starts exchanging the files or loading in other programs. The interface should warn the user and offer a couple sensible choices, one of them (and maybe the default) being to save using one of the UTFs. YA