Hi Peter, I think you're smuggling a -k or -K through to the first groff that pdfmom runs. Here's its -Tpdf pipeline again.
groff -Tpdf -dPDF.EXPORT=1 -mom -z $cmdstring 2>&1 | grep '^.ds' | groff -Tpdf -mom - $preconv $cmdstring The problem is grep seeing invalid UTF-8 and thus deciding stdin is binary. A preconv(1) would turn your UTF-8 troff source into ISO-8859-1, and any non-ASCII characters in that would probably be invalid UTF-8. But pdfmom has tried to spot -k or -K in its arguments and arrange for them to be moved from $cmdstring to $preconv and so used only by the second groff. If it's simplistic argv[] parsing has failed, because you've -xyzk for example, then your -k remains in $cmdstring and affects the first groff. Do that strace command again and look at what's being run for that pipeline. That should show the problem. > Argh. Why don't they make special glasses that let > you see code as if for the first time whenever you put them on? Like those for proofreading? :-) -- Cheers, Ralph. https://plus.google.com/+RalphCorderoy