Document encoding refers to the process that HotDog uses when:
Translating a saved document's binary information into characters that can be displayed on-screen.
Translating characters on-screen into binary information to be stored in a saved document.
Generally you will need to use the Encoding drop-down list within the File Dialog when opening or saving a document that contains non-American English characters.
ANSI stands for American National Standards Institute, the standards organization that developed ASCII (American Standard for Computer Information Interchange). ASCII is basically a set of agreed-upon binary numbers, each number representing an individual text character. For example, a lowercase "d" is represented by the number 100, which in turn translates to 1100100 in binary - this is how the letter "d" is stored in an ASCII encoded file.
The standard ASCII character set defined by ANSI contains 128 characters. An Extended ASCII character set may then be used to add a further 128 characters to the standard 128 ASCII characters. Accented and non-Latin characters are defined in this extended character range.
There are many different versions of the Extended ASCII character set. Therefore an Extended ASCII code may represent a particular character on a Unix Web browser using French language settings, whilst representing a different character on a Spanish Windows 95 system. This means that documents containing characters that are not included in the first 128 characters of the ASCII code-set may look different on a screen from computer to computer. In fact, Extended ASCII-encoded documents may be unreadable if viewed on a computer using a different region-based Extended ASCII character set to the computer that was used to create the document.
It is recommended that documents containing only the following characters be opened and saved in ANSI format:
Upper and lowercase English
American English punctuation
Base 10 numbers
These characters can be read in any Web browser on any system that can read ASCII/ANSI encoded information, no matter what the system's language or regional settings are. The advantage of using ASCII-encoded documents is that they are smaller than Unicode-encoded files.
Unicode is a standard for defining a character set, which contains unique binary codes/numbers for every character of every language. Programs and operating systems that can read Unicode can also read standard ASCII characters. Unicode should be used for any document containing accented characters (used in the French and German languages for example) or non-Latin characters (such as those used by Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese etc). Pages encoded using Unicode will display properly on any system that supports Unicode, no matter what the language or regional settings for that system are. Most modern browsers and systems support Unicode.
Unicode documents are larger than ASCII documents because more memory is required to record each individual character of a Unicode-encoded document.
UTF-8 is an implementation of the Unicode standard that uses compression to make documents smaller in size. UTF-8 is useful when you wish to use Unicode to display accented or non-Latin characters properly on all systems, but want to minimise the size of your document file. However, some browsers, such as Internet Explorer, may require some customisation of font settings by the user in order for the browser to display UTF-8 encoded documents properly.
This is exactly the same as UTF-8, however the defining "signature" code that is usually placed at the start of a document to identify it as a UTF-8 encoded document is not included in the file. Files that use UTF-8 encoding but which do not include the UTF-8 signature have usually been created on a UNIX system, as the UTF-8 signature at the start of a file can cause unusual side-effects when the document is used in a UNIX executable program.
This option will normally only be used to open files that you know have been encoded in UTF-8 without a signature.
If Auto is selected when opening or saving a file, HotDog will examine the contents of the file to determine what encoding method it should or does use.