Different systems (DOS PCs, Windows PCs, Apple computers, World Wide Web) sometimes use different encodings, and it is important to know which encoding a document uses, otherwise, if the wrong encoding is chosen for displaying the document, gibberish will usually be displayed.
Unicode (sometimes called UCS, Universal Coded Character Set) is a special case. The Unicode project aims to encode all characters of all languages and all symbols. Due to the very large number of characters, the codes in Unicode are translated into numerical sequences differently depending on the encoding, for efficiency reasons. The most important encodings are UTF-16 LE under Windows and UTF-8 for the web and for GEDCOM files.
The most important codes for AGS are listed in the following table:
| Coding | ID | use |
|---|---|---|
| ANSI - Latin I | 1252 | Standard encoding under Windows in Central Europe, mandatory for RTF files |
| UTF-16 LE | 1200 | Unicode, the standard encoding under Windows |
| UTF-8 | 65001 | Unicode, common on the web, GEDCOM files |
| US-ASCII | 20127 | 7-bit, letters, numbers and some special characters |
| OEM | 437 | DOS (US code site), Omega |
| ANSEL | - | GEDCOM files |
| ISO 8859-1 Latin I | 28591 | Standard encoding under Unix in Central Europe |
| MAC - Romansh | 10000 | Apple computers |
You can use the following rules of thumb to guess the encoding of a file:
Text documents (notes, GEDCOM files, etc.) can be in different encodings. The editor and the GEDCOM import wizard usually detect the document's encoding automatically. However, you can also set the encoding of the file to be opened in the lower section of the file open dialog if you know it. The encoding selection is usually pre-filled with a question mark ( ?) , which means the program guesses the encoding.