Google docs to TeX and pdf shell script produces a blank first page, and gives me a "! LaTeX Error: Missing \begin{document}." error

Question

I made a shell script, Ubuntu 14.04 (taking ideas from google docs as team editor) to grab a google docs file and convert it to LaTeX, compile with LaTeXmk to PDF and then open the pdF with evince as follows:

#!/bin/bash

wget -O $2.tex "https://docs.google.com/document/export?format=txt&id=$1" &&    latexmk -pdf -f -interaction=nonstopmode $2.tex || evince $2.pdf

The first argument of the script $1 is the file sharing id of the file I want to grab the text from (I made a shareable link of the google doc and take the id from there), the second $2 is the name of the file I want to produce without the file extension.

It works okay, but for some reason produces a blank first page. It also produces lots of errors. However, I suspect that the blank first page results from this error:

! LaTeX Error: Missing \begin{document}.

My google docs document ends up producing a LaTeX file that looks like this:

\documentclass{article} 
\begin{document}

I am the walrus.

\end{document}

Which is exactly how the google doc looks. So I don't know why it would complain about a missing \begin{document} when I have one in my file. Not surprisingly, having little to no programming skills, I haven't been able to figure out why it is producing output starting on the 2nd page. And so here I am, any help greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

I had to remove the BOM Before LaTeXmk processing. I used the BOM stripper script from here BOM Remover Script, threw it in /usr/local/bin and changed my script as follows:

#!/bin/bash

wget -O $2.tex "https://docs.google.com/document/export?format=txt&id=$1"; 
bom-remove.sh $2.tex; 
latexmk -pdf -f -interaction=nonstopmode $2.tex;
evince $2.pdf

And now it works. To use the script I call it by name, in my system it is "glatex". Following the script name I put the google doc id something like "1-JdNOZ_73GfRgsRF4u2pWc16HGze-VZKxMgjofTXf5k", and finally the name I want to call both my LaTeX file and my pdf file, "filename" which will get turned into filename.tex and filename.pdf by the script using the google doc whose id is input.

What I like about this is that I get to edit with google docs, use its collaboration abilities and time tracking abilities. Yet, I am using my own LaTeX environment to compile. It really is the best of both worlds.