1

Suddenly I am getting the cryptic "Text line contains an invalid character" errors (100 of them) on all my beamer files. Even this MWE doesn't work right:

\documentclass{beamer} 

\begin{document} 

Sample document. 

\end{document}

I am using the latest TeXnicCenter (2.02 stable) and Miktex 2.9 - what has gone wrong?

My feeling is that something is screwed up with the encodings but I can't figure out what.

UPDATE: Texmaker doesn't work either, giving this error: "A funny symbol that I can't read has just been input."

Improve this question
16
  • 1
    Did it say exactly which lines are problematic – daleif Dec 26 '13 at 20:24
  • Just for the fun of it, what happens if you use the Texmaker or texstudio editors? – daleif Dec 26 '13 at 20:27
  • @daleif Texmaker fails as well. They all blame line 1. – Felix Goldberg Dec 26 '13 at 20:43
  • 2
    What is the encode shown by TeXmaker? You can read it on the status bar. – Sigur Dec 26 '13 at 20:54
  • 2
    You could look with a hex editor, if you have a Byte Order Mark (BOM) at the start of your file. You shouldn't have one of those. – Juri Robl Dec 26 '13 at 22:01
3

Having seen the .tex file, there is no problem with the code. The .log on the other hand reveals that the culprit is ifpdf.sty, after receiving ifpdf.sty by email we can conclude it is corrupt. In my emacs all the file contains is ^@.

I recommend a MikTeX reinstall, or even moving to TL (just because I generally prefer TL over MikTeX even on Windows).

Improve this answer
2
  • Thanks a lot for putting time and effort into this. Is there a way to fix the mess without reinstalling engines? Say, would re-installing the ifpdf package suffice? – Felix Goldberg Dec 27 '13 at 17:20
  • We have no idea if there are other packages that are messed up, so it would be better to reinstall. Also your beamer is from 2010, there has been a lot of updates since then. – daleif Dec 27 '13 at 17:26

Your Answer

By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our terms of service, privacy policy and cookie policy

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.