Use UTF-16? How to correctly implement localisation.

Reading the on-line documentation, I was under the impression the default format for Java when reading properties files was UTF-16 ( http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/i18n/text/convertintro.html )

However when saving a file (using gedit in GNOME) to UTF-16 I get an error. (Java can't read the file apparently). I'm coding an GPL application where 3th parties provide localisation files. currently for German I've had to turn to replacing the special characters with /u00xx codes. But that's not how it should be. especially since a Russian translation is ion the making.

How is this supposed to go?

[628 byte] By [finalbetaa] at [2007-11-26 19:13:35]