I had always used Crimson Editor a freeware text editor from
http://www.crimsoneditor.com/ , when i used to build website, hand coding the site pages and CSS.
Unless someone knows a good text editor a freeware type, because of the money situation I can't afford a shareware or any other type of text editor.
I also have Open Office 2.0 (
http://www.openoffice.org/ ), the open office writer have 2 xml it can save one is called doc book and the other one is microsoft word 2003 xml.
but even with both of these programs i don't know if either of these program change the encoding or not. unless someone like to check it out and tell me that would be nice.