Frank, > > Any ideas about how to ignore BOMs? > > BOMs? as in www.bom.com? sorry for being ignorant Byte Order Mark, which is added by many editors to identify the Unicode encoding. It is added at the very beginning of the document, with the combination EF BB BF meaning UTF-8 (ie, U+FEFF in UTF-8). I played around with different approachs to get rid of them (or to take them into account) in plain, but I have not found a satisfactory solution. In LaTeX it's more or less easy, provided the format is modified, since they are placed before \documentclass. Javier