2009-11-13 18:15:23 UTC
CP850 is the DOS code page for western languages (most european ones with roman alphabet). Users in eastern Europe may open a document written in cyrillic script using a font geared to render the extended latin charset. Copy/paste sometimes gets the encodings wrong. There have been several requests on this forum about "Why does it look like áéèó or similar.".
UCS2-LE is the Unicode 16 little endian file encoding. A number of text files in non latin languages are written using this, so there is a potential or quite a few flavours of wrong text encoding.
If you choose, for Normal text, a font that supports CP866, then Notepad++ won't properly display text encoded using CP1251, and vice versa. You may want to visit the free section of www.paratype.com, they have fonts for either encoding - CP866 and CP1251 at least.
I know, code pages are such a mess. This is why almost everyone migrates towards Unicode, either using UTF8 or 16. But, as you mentoned on your earlier post, not everyone does.
I think I remember using a chart for CP866 found on Wikipedia to design the table. I'll fetch one for KOI-8 and extend.
At any rate, thanks for the clrification and corrections.
CChris
