Help on an unusual LaTeX error

I ran into a somewhat unusual LaTeX error earlier today, for which I was unable to Google any relevant information, so I thought I'd put a quick description up here for the next person who runs into this and goes searching for help online. If you didn't get here by searching for help with this problem, you probably won't be interested in the rest of the article.



The relevant section of the error message reads:


! LaTeX Error: Missing \begin{document}.

...

1.1

\ d o c u m e n t c l a s s { a r t i c l e }

The problem turned out to be that I was that my LaTeX installation was expecting an ASCII input file, whereas I was feeding it something encoded with Unicode. I fixed this by opening the file in wordpad, using the "Save as..." option, and changing the dropdown box from Unicode text to regular text.

Apparently there are techniques for getting your LaTeX installation to handle Unicode input, but I'm not really sure how it's done. In the mean time, I guess I'll be writing all my math papers in English, rather than Japanese, Persian, or Tengwar.