13.4.3.3 Specifying encoding for double-byte characters
Character encoding determines what method is used to represent double-byte characters in the <body> section of HTML output. To specify encoding or, alternatively, numeric references:
; Encoding = ISO-8859-1 (HTML default, numeric refs),
; or None (write 0x80-0xFF as single characters)
; QuotedEncoding = No (default, W3C usage, required for JavaHelp),
; or Yes (put encoding in meta tag in single quotes, needed by some
; NumericCharRefs = Yes (default, always use &#nnn;)
For XHTML, the Mif2Go default is to claim UTF-8 as the encoding, but to use numeric references of the form &#nnn; for all characters that would have to be encoded; this satisfies all browsers. That is, Mif2Go does not actually produce any characters with values greater than 127 using the UTF-8 encoding; instead, Mif2Go uses entities for such characters, readable under any eight-bit encoding scheme.
For XHTML, you can specify a value for XMLEncoding (see §14.3.3 Specifying character encoding for generic XML) other than the default UTF-8. If you set Encoding=UTF-8, you get real UTF-8 encoding (two characters) in place of the numeric character references. However, you can still force use of numeric references by also setting NumericCharRefs=Yes.
While Encoding=None is not strictly compliant, this setting can be useful in places like Russia, where almost the entire text would otherwise consist of numeric character references. Encoding=None provides a 6:1 reduction in such references.
To direct Mif2Go to supply single quotes around the charset attribute value, specify QuotedEncoding=Yes:
<meta http-equiv="Content-type" content="text/html; charset='ISO-8859-1'">
The default is not to enclose the value in quotes.
§13.16.2 Replacing high ASCII characters for W3C validation
§14.3.3 Specifying character encoding for generic XML
§21.5 Assigning properties to text formats
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