Your post is a must-read for any user of SAS Studio dealing with extended ascii character sets like the Latin-1 etc. (iso 8859-1 etc.) : almost mandatory reading ! Should I suggest you cross-post the article to the SAS community forums as well, this might reach many more non-english SAS users ;).

Another way still to change the default encoding of SAS Studio editor is to modify the 'webdms.defaultEncoding' parameter :

http://documentation.sas.com/?docsetId=webeditorag&docsetTarget=p1ghk2x06a9nknn0zwtf39hzcddw.htm&docsetVersion=3.6&locale=en

This modification does not persist when the SAS Studio web applicaton is being rebuilt, in contrast to the user's preference settings (now my personal favourite ).