Hello, William. The Microsoft has you! If not, you are lucky...

To make all charsets possible, I'd make it support xlat files like this:

===
0000 0000
0543 5498
4545 34543554
45   546233
5FA8942AB9 7B
===

First is the sequence to replace into the second sequence (in hex).

Thus, to read CP866 (the default Russian charset in Fidonet) with UTF-8
locale, you'd need CP866->UTF-8 (any to multiple characters) table.
To write CP866 with UTF-8 locale, UTF-8->CP866 (multiple to any characters).

That's the problem with GoldED - it is not able to translate multiple to
any, and this stops most people from even trying UTF-8 if another encoding
is needed usually.

I myself don't program now, especially in C, so I can't help more.

=^..^= Good luck! +++
To save our world, smash the state! [L. F.]
--- GoldED+/W32 1.1.5-040120