I opened some logs written by one of my scripts and found it was all full of s?t?u?f?f? ?l?i?k?e? ?t?h?i?s?.?

Turns out the files are all UTF-16. I generally use UTF-8 for everything, and I see no real reason for writing plain old log files in UTF-16. Mac OS Roman would be perfectly adequate, and somehow seems more like what you'd expect to get from AppleScript.

I can't find anything in the Language Guide that suggests you can specify which text encoding to use. All it really says on the subject is that "AppleScript provides partial support for...Unicode Text," which they seem to equate with UTF-16. (Both UTF-8 and UTF-16 are Unicode.) In light of that, it seems odd that they would make UTF-16 the default encoding when they say they only provide "partial support," whatever that means, for it.

Does anybody know if it's possible to set the default text encoding, sort of like the way you can set the default text item delimiters?