Converting text from Unicode to ASCII
Just had to convert some text files from Unicode to ASCII and used Vim to do it:
Open each file and notice that vim says [converted] at the bottom, indicating that it has transparently opened the unicode file to let you edit that file.
On each file, change the file encoding setting to latin1 (basic ASCII):
:set fenc=latin1
Then save the file and it will be converted:
:wq
FYI, The vim docs note that changing the "encoding" setting does not affect existing text so that won't work.