Jesse,

> >   Beware that I'm going to propose, (err, I propose) to switch to
> > UTF-8 file out and latin-1 internal representation.  To maintain the
> > backward compatibility, we would want to have different fileout
> > suffixes.
> 
> Is there a reason you think changing the fileout suffix is better than
> including the encoding information in the fileout's header?

  We could add a header line to a file.  How do you want to make it look like?
Probably, a line like:
'encoding: ''mac-roman'''!
or such?

-- Yoshiki