I work a lot with files encoded in ISO8859-15. Textedit has an option
to automatically file charset at startup, despite I have activated
that option, Textedit still doesn't recognize encoding of these files.

$ echo é > ~/abc.txt
$ cat ~/abc.txt

é

So that works.  But open ~/abc.txt with TextEdit, and I get:

È

Duh.  Tiger's TextEdit was smarter.  Post back if you discover a fix.

--
K.