A brief note on how to find problematic non-ASCII characters (e.g. from copying-and-pasting) that cause problems compiling LateX.

If you find an error like this in your compilation log

Missing character: There is no � in font pplr7t!

Then this is due to non-ASCII characters. To find the offender, do the following:

On Mac, you need to install pcre (here with homebrew):

brew install pcre

Then one can do the following (where instead of *.tex it often also makes sense to check the *.bib files as well):

pcregrep --color='auto' -n "[\x80-\xFF]" *.tex

See also https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3001177/how-do-i-grep-for-all-non-ascii-characters-in-unix

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