Pages does not pretend to be a text editor. If you want to edit text files, you are much better off using TextEdit or other programs.
When you Export a text file from Pages, it usually uses either Western (Mac OS Roman) or unicode UTF16 as encoding. You cannot choose which encoding you want, and you cannot for sure tell what encoding it was, unless you verify in some other program like TextWrangler.
When you import text files, Pages can usually open UTF16 without any problem and usually also Western (Mac OS Roman). Pages is unable to open the common UTF8 format.
The workaround is to always use TextEdit or another program for text files. You can then copy the content to Pages - if you want to.
2 comments:
I am pretty sure that Pages can open UTF-8 with BOM, as is typically created by Windows (but not by Macs).
You are right, Tom. UTF-8 with BOM works fine.
I think I tried to keep the original post as simple as possible, just stressing the point that Pages was not a good tool for text files. The sly wording "the common UTF8 format" was probably meant to hint "without BOM".
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