Songsheet Generator (Windows: as of version 2.8; Mac OS X: all versions) is a fully Unicode-enabled application, and is able to handle ChordPro files in a variety of character encodings, in order to support international character sets.
Songs that are encoded in Unicode as UTF-16 and UTF-8 with a byte-order mark (BOM) are detected by Songsheet Generator automatically.
When a byte-order mark is not present, however, Songsheet Generator needs to be told how it should interpret the text in the file. A checkbox on the general options property page controls the interpretation of such files.
When the "Use UTF-8 as default song file encoding" checkbox is checked, Songsheet Generator will presume that all song files are encoded in UTF-8 (unless a BOM is present). If it is not checked, the file encoding will match the native encoding of the operating system. This checkbox is new in Songsheet Generator 2.8 for Windows and 1.4 for Mac OS X. When upgrading from an older version of Songsheet Generator, this box is unchecked, to ensure compatability with old song files; new installations will have this setting turned on by default.
Please note that it is not possible to mix UTF-8 and non-UTF-8 encoded files, unless the UTF-8 files have a BOM. If song files appear with strange characters, please double-check the file encoding and the state of the UTF-8 checkbox.