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

[Pierre MacKay]

On 06/05/2011 01:30 PM, Reinhard Kotucha wrote:
> On 2011-06-05 at 14:54:34 -0400, Thomas Schneider wrote:
>
>   >  >  >  There are three bogus bytes at the very beginning of the file:
>   >  ...
>   >
>   >  >  So it seems notepad in Windows have done some formatting of the file
>   >  >  formatting which I didn't notice.
>   >
>   >  That's yet Another reason to add to the pile to avoid Windows.  Under
>   >  Unix with vim you would have seen those characters.
>
> Are you sure?  It's only *one* character and I doubt that there is a
> font which has a glyph for it.
>
> Regards,
>    Reinhard
>
>    
I quote from page 105, of The _Unicode 5.0 standard_:

      Because the UTF-8 encoding schene already deals in ordered byte 
sequences, the UTF-8 encoding scheme is               trivial.    The 
byte ordering is completely defined by the UTF-8 code unit itself.


     While there is obviously no need for a byte order (= bigendian vs 
littleendian ) signature when using UTF-8, there       are occasions 
when processes convert UTF-16 or UTF-32 data containing a byte order 
mark into UTF-8. When             represented in UTF-8, the byte order 
mark turns into the byte sequence <EF BB BF>.  Its usage at the 
beginning       of a UTF-8 data stream is neither required nor 
recommended by the Unicode standard.

Notepad has, in typical Microsoft behavior,"made it better for you" by 
including a totally unnecessary byte sequence that properly designed 
software would have left out.

No, there is certainly NOT a font character corresponding with this byte 
sequence.

The specifications for UTF-8 are absolutely brilliant, and are followed 
by all Unix/Linux applications that I have encountered..  Perhaps 
someday Microsoft will enter the 21st century too

Pierre MacKay


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