[texhax] Blank first page problem (how to remove?)

Philipp Stephani st_philipp at yahoo.de
Sun Jun 5 22:00:48 CEST 2011


Am 05.06.2011 um 20:13 schrieb Johnny:

> Reinhard Kotucha <reinhard.kotucha at web.de> writes:
> 
>> On 2011-06-05 at 17:06:57 +0100, Johnny wrote:
>> 
>>> Martin Schröder <martin at oneiros.de> writes:
>>> 
>>>> 2011/6/4 Johnny <yggdrasil at gmx.co.uk>:
>>>>> the first blank page always remains. ??? I am totally puzzled!
>>>> 
>>>> POST YOUR LOGFILE
>>> 
>>> I didn't notice your reply, as I haven't properly updated my filter
>>> rules for incoming mail since joining this mailing list, apologies for
>>> that. 
>>> 
>>> The logfile, of course! That led me to investigate and manage a
>>> solution. 
>>> 
>>> Acutally, running the test script in from editing a new buffer, I was
>>> unable to reproduce the problem myself, but going to the original file I
>>> "stripped down" to the minimalist format originally posted, the problem
>>> reappeared. I believe the cause is that I edited the file in Winows
>>> notepad at work at some point and this inserted invisible illegal
>>> character in the file! Saving the file in emacs and 'C-x RET f' and set
>>> encoding to nil solves the problem. Still not sure about what Windows
>>> really did to corrupt the file though?
>> 
>> There are three bogus bytes at the very beginning of the file: 
>> 
>> l.1 ï
>>     »¿\documentclass{article}
>> You're in trouble here.  Try typing  <return>  to proceed.
>> If that doesn't work, type  X <return>  to quit.
>> 
>> Missing character: There is no ï in font nullfont!
>> Missing character: There is no » in font nullfont!
>> Missing character: There is no ¿ in font nullfont!
>> 
> So it seems notepad in Windows have done some formatting of the file
> formatting which I didn't notice.

It's technically not related to formatting, Notepad just added a UTF-8 BOM (byte-order mark) to tag the file as a UTF-8 file. This is legitimate, but some pre-Unicode applications are not prepared to handle it.


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