Re: "à" in title makes damaged pdf

[james]

On Feb 24, 2013, at 12:12 PM, yvand wrote:

> Le 24/02/2013 02:19, Thomas Morley a écrit :
>> 2013/2/24 yvand <address@hidden>:
>>> Hi lilypond developpers,
>>> 
>>> I wanted to type the well-known composition "Für Elise" in lilypond for a 
>>> friend.
>>> Unfortunately, the PDF generated by lilypond was damaged (according to 
>>> evince,
>>> gimp, inkscape)! After some tests, I found what was the problem.
>>> The title was "Lettre à Élise" (translation in French of "Letter for 
>>> Elise"),
>>> and the character "à" in the title was the origin of the problem! (same 
>>> problem
>>> in other header fields)
>>> It seems so odd, amazing for me that only this "special" character was the
>>> problem. Indeed, other "special" characters (such as é, É, è, È, ç, Ç, ù, 
>>> Ù, À
>>> (à uppercase!) etc) works fine!
>>> 
>>> PS : Sorry for my bad English.
>>> 
>>> -- yvand
>>> 
>>> 
>>> Below is an example of code that generates a damaged pdf :
>>> 
>>> \version "2.16.2"
>>> 
>>> \header{
>>>   title = "Lettre à Élise"
>>> }
>>> 
>>> melody = \relative c' {
>>>   \clef treble \key c \major \time 3/4 \partial 4
>>>   e'8 dis | e dis e b d c | a4. c,8 e a \bar "||"
>>> }
>>> 
>>> \score {
>>>   \new Staff \melody
>>> }
>> Hi,
>> 
>> I tested your code with 2.16.1 and 2.17.12 on Ubuntu 10.04
>> 
>> Both versions return a correct pdf.
>> 
>> Could someone test it with 2.16.2 (I don't have this version)?
>> 
>> -Harm
> Hi,
> 
> I tested on my xubuntu 12.04.2 LTS with lilypond 2.14.2 and it works !
> 
> The problem occurs (as described in the original mail) on my archlinux using 
> lilypond 2.16.2 (package installed : community/lilypond 2.16.2-1) (changing 
> \version in the .ly file makes nothing).
> The output of the lilypond command is completely normal, but the generated 
> pdf is damaged.

As has been mentioned upthread, the problem here is not in lilypond, nor in the 
file, exactly. The problem is the character encoding. (You can look up 
character encoding on wikipedia if you really want to know more about it.) More 
to the point: the best way to help solve your problem would be to know which 
program you use to create the lilypond file and then find out how to enable 
utf-8 by default in the program.