documentclass not being recognized

Question

My tex document has the following as the first two lines:

\documentclass[letterpaper,draft,12pt]{article}

\begin{document}

When I run: latex civil.tex I get the following output:

This is pdfTeX, Version 3.1415926-1.40.10 (TeX Live 2009/Debian)
entering extended mode
(./civil.tex
LaTeX2e <2009/09/24>
Babel <v3.8l> and hyphenation patterns for english, usenglishmax, dumylang, noh
yphenation, loaded.

 ! LaTeX Error: Missing \begin{document}.

 See the LaTeX manual or LaTeX Companion for explanation.
Type  H <return>  for immediate help.
 ...                                              

l.1 
     ��\documentclass[letterpaper,draft,12pt]{article}
? 

(/usr/share/texmf-texlive/tex/latex/base/article.cls
Document Class: article 2007/10/19 v1.4h Standard LaTeX document class
(/usr/share/texmf-texlive/tex/latex/base/size12.clo)
Overfull \hbox (20.0pt too wide) in paragraph at lines 1--284
[]|
[1]) (./civil.aux) [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14]
[15] [16] [17] [18] [19] [20] (./civil.aux) )
Output written on civil.dvi (20 pages, 72800 bytes).
Transcript written on civil.log.

I'm kind of new to this, I don't know what is wrong. The document generates but the first page is blank. The rest of the document generated seems right, except that it looks like it is using a book layout (on the letterpaper the text doesn't take up that much space).

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

You have some non printable characters in your TeX-file before \documentclass. Delete the line and write it new should help, if you cannot see these two characters in your editor to delete only these two ones.

Answer 2

As Herbert says, you have garbage on the first line. Most likely, this is a UTF-8 BOM, which is sometimes inserted by various editors. Make sure to set your editor not to use this BOM when editing .tex files.