Two related questions, the second dependent on the answer to the first. 1. Is XeTeX happy with a BOM in UTF-8 files 2. Could TeXworks be enhanced to (a) recognise, and (b) insert if absent, a BOM in UTF-8 files ?
The reason for my request is that while, on a day-to-day basis, I work solely in UTF-8, I have a suite of legacy (ISO-8859-1) files on which I need to continue to work. No matter whether I configure TeXworks to operate by default in UTF-8 or ISO-8859-1, there invariably comes a time when I open a file of the other type, make a change (without noticing that some of the on-screen characters are wrong) and attempt to compile. At that point, the file is saved with the wrong encoding, and unless I have an archival copy, all is lost. Philip Taylor