BOM can ruin your happy groffing experience

[Oliver Corff]

Dear All,

currently I am working on a translation of a scientific article. So I
prepared an mm source file, one paragraph original text, to be commented
out once the translation of that paragraph is finished, then followed by
the next paragraph, to be commented out and followed by translation, and
so on.

So I started my text with

.ig
Lots of Chinese here
..
.TL

.AU

...

No matter what I tried (.ig ... .., .ig end ... .end), the Chinese
material spilled all over the head of the typeset page. What went wrong?
At first I tried to find out whether the behaviour of .ig is different
in the ms and mm macro packages: no difference. Then I had the idea to
copy the Chinese material into a testbed file which I had prepared
earlier. No problem either.

The text file had been prepared by saving a Chinese word document as
text, and during this process, the byte order mark +UFEFF had crept in
/before/ the first dot.

So the first line effectively was:

<feff>.ig

No wonder it did not work. Would it be meaningful to (optionally) tell
groff to jump over or throw away BOMs it encounters at the beginning of
a file? Or should sanity and awareness be left with the astute user?

Best regards,

Oliver.


--
Dr. Oliver Corff
mailto:oliver.corff@email.de