Legacy ImageMagick Discussions Archive

Windows 7, IM 6.5.8-8:

convert -size 1920x1080 -gravity South ^
-background None ^
-fill blue ^
-font Verdana -pointsize 100 ^
caption:@captCopy.txt ^
captCopy.png

captcopy.txt is encoded in UTF-8:
{ef}{bb}{bf}Copyright {c2}{a9} 2010 Alan Gibson\r\n

Where {ef} is the single byte, represented in hex as EF, etc.

The first three bytes are the UTF byte order mark, commonly added by Windows software to indicate UTF coding.

ImageMagick correctly interprets {c2}{a9} as the copyright symbol, but writes a question mark for {ef}{bb}{bf}. Could it please ignore BOM?

In the mean time, can you not use a Windows editor that skips the BOM? It appears that Notepad can do that. See viewtopic.php?f=1&t=15326&p=54104&hilit=BOM#p54104

That is "Notepad++", which is a different program.

There are lots of workarounds. For this purpose, I use a program that strips out any BOMs from a file. But it is annoying; the correct behaviour for IM, I feel, is to act like any text editor and not to display the "?" glyph or any other glyph for a BOM.