Hello Evi,
I would say that HippoEDIT works as designed. Some versions BEFORE there was a bug. And in latest betas I have fixed it.
I see that it works not like you have expected but from my point of view logic is correct. But if somebody would prove that it is wrong, well then I can change it

But first I would try to explain the logic how and then which setting is used:
Some preconditions:
1) File can have one encoding (same as code page), encoding cam be as unicode UTF16 LE, BE (1200, 1201), UTF8 (65000) as not unicode as 1252 (Western European) etc.
2) There are several places, where encoding conversion can be applied to document:
Open,
Save As,
New,
Search and Replace3) There are several places where encoding can be selected/changed: File Open/Save dialog, via context menu or status bar, in Project Settings, in
Tools->Options->Document settings, in syntax specification (here you can set as prefferd encoding, as
forced encoding). In addition to this HippoEDIT does an autodetection of the encoding using different algorithms (Check BOM bytes, statistics test for UTF16 LE/BE, statistics test for UTF8, check by encoding strings and same checks as IE uses).
4) If encoding for document once changed by user, this preference has priority over all the rest of settings. Preferences is machine specific, and could be some when lost if HippoEDIT temp files would be deleted or format of them would chnage in new version.
So, how all this works togeter (or designed to work

) :
1)
New File encoding selection
- Syntax force encoding
- Current Project settings encoding
- Document settings encoding
- Syntax preffered encoding
- System local encoding
2)
Open File encoding selection
- Syntax force encoding
- Encoding selected in File Open dialog
- Auto-detected encoding with usage of all algorithms mentioned above. Set of applied algorithms can be chnaged in settings.xml
- Syntax preffered encoding
- Project settings encoding taken
- Document setting encoding
- System local encoding
3)
Save File encoding selection
- Encoding selected in File Save dialog
- Current document encoding
- During save HippoEDIT checks consistance of current document encoding and encoding found with encoding strings (XML, HTML etc). If encoding does not match, user would be asked to select which encoding to use
- Because HippoEDIT inernally works with Unicode representation of text (UTF16 LE), on save can happen then current text could not be saved without lost of information in current selected encoding. In this case HippoEDIT should pop-up a warning informing user about possible data loss and suggest to save document as Unicode or using some another encoding. This behaviour controlled by flag Check encoding accuracy in Tools->Options->Formatting
4)
Search and Replace encoding uses same logic as for Open/Save file just interactive selection of encoding with Open/Save dialog not available.
So, if you see that documents are open in wrong encoding, you have seveal choices:
1) Explicitely select correct encoding in File Open dialog
2) Set for syntax you use forced encoding:
<Encoding default="852" force="true"/>in SPECIFICATION section of schema spec file.
3) Disable extended auto-detection (IE algorithms), it can return wrong result if data for analysis is not sufficient.
settings.xml, section General
<EncodingDetectionExtended>false</EncodingDetectionExtended> Best regards,
Alex
P.S: I would copy most part of the message to FAQ section.