I suggest to use MS Word.
It's useful to activate the (mostly unknown) "Confirm conversion at
Open" option.
Interesting - Word lets you choose the encoding of textfiles even
without this option enabled; turning it on seems to (1) enable a
mandatory additional menu to pick a sort of file format (rtf, xml,
"Plain Text" (?), "Encoded text", ...) before entering the choice of
encoding dialogue for opening files and (2) turn on the (otherwise
inaccessible) choice of encoding dialogue for saving files (which
conveniently displays unencodable characters in red).
Though I must say that all these menus could benefit from user interface
improvement (for one thing, they're visually too small), and the
documentation of commercial and that of "free" software leave me equally
unimpressed. But what you pointed us to is very good to know.
Stephan
