Comment 13 for bug 67844

Guys, do not quarrel over workaround. ;-)
All text editors like for example geany, leafpad, kate or nano may be used. As I wrote, I used geany to change file encoding. Worked fine.
You do not even need any other app to solve the issue, gedit is just enoug. But it forces you to do unexpected things and thus making gedit user-unfriendly. :-(

You can choose encoding when opening file from inside gedit (open file form). And then save it using gedit as whatever encoding you need.