After upgrading my beloved UltraEdit-32 to UEStudio '05 some way through last year, I began noticing that if I copied text from that program into, say, a text field in Firefox, £ signs would become œ signs. Other characters were also affected.

I'd just gotten a new laptop so I figured that SP2 might have had some weird codepage anomaly, and eventually got used to manually altering some characters when I pasted draft journal entries from UEStudio into textfields on the web.

But then I noticed the same was happening on my home PC.

Occasionally, I'd take a shot at figuring out just what combination of codepages and locales might possibly lead to this bizarre effect. But, with Wikipedia as my sword, I was unable to figure out any single or double codepage translation which would translate £ into œ. I learnt a lot about Unicode, though.

Eventually I just sort of gave up… until yesterday, when I discovered the "OEM Character Set" option on UEStudio's "View" menu, which is automatically checked. The UEStudio menubars have images on some of the options such as this one, making it difficult to see that they are checked. And having gone through all of UEStudio's codepage options, I figured I'd covered all my bases.

But no, after turning off that option, I find that everything is as it should be.

So, the question is, why does UEStudio have this (apparently) useless option on by default, and why did it take me so long to find it? And I wonder if the latest standalone versions of UltraEdit (i.e. not in the Suite) have the same "feature"?