Long-standing promise on the I18N side.... Nvu now offers the ability to change the character set of a document without having to save and reload it, and a new entry in the preferences panel allows to specify a default character set for new documents. Enjoy 

Comments
Seeing as everything in the Options dialog is theoretically a setting of sorts, what about using just "New Page" instead of New Page Settings ?
Please use wording 'Character Encoding' instead of 'Character Set' / 'charset'.
See also:
Bug 232722 - change 'character coding' to 'character encoding'
bugzilla.mozilla.org/show...
Is there going to be a "default" for english speakers who don't know which one to pick because they've never had to deal with stuff like this before?
could be great to add a very short sample of each encoding that presents characters specific to the encoding. I mean, one european webmaster may love to see a picture with éàè€ to understand that it IS the char-set he needs... Same for asian, and so on...