[OS X TeX] Re: invalid character error message

[Jonathan Kew]

On 2 May 2005, at 11:26 pm, Wolter Rose wrote:

> OK, I tried to include the preamble for the sake of completeness but
> GMail screwed up. Anyway I have a document which I texed under Panther
> with no problem. Now under Tiger and TeXShop 2.0 I get this error:
>
> This is pdfeTeX, Version 3.141592-1.20a-2.2 (Web2C 7.5.3)
> output format initialized to PDF
> entering extended mode
> (./WebLinks.tex
> LaTeX2e <2003/12/01>
> Babel <v3.8d> and hyphenation patterns for american, british, dutch,  
> nohyphenat
> ion, loaded.
> ! Text line contains an invalid character.
> l.1 ^^@
>         
> \^^@d^^@o^^@c^^@u^^@m^^@e^^@n^^@t^^@c^^@l^^@a^^@s^^@s^^@[^^@1^^@2^^@p.. 
> .
>
> ?
>
>
> Any thoughts on what is going on here are appreciated.

Your document has been saved as Unicode (UTF-16) by whatever  
application you've opened/edited it with, and pdfetex doesn't  
understand this; it's reading the individual bytes of the 16-bit  
Unicode values, and every other one is a null (zero) byte, whose TeX  
\catcode is "invalid" (by default).

You probably want to change the default document encoding in TeXShop's  
Preferences to something more appropriate (if you want Unicode, UTF-8  
is the appropriate encoding form to choose).

JK

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