Special characters

When entering normal text, you must watch out for a few things. Some characters are reserved for commands to L^ATEX, and are treated as such unless you tell L^ATEX to treat them as normal characters. To use the characters

	# $ % & _ { }

outside of a verbatim environment (see Section 6 for more information on environments), you must precede them with a backslash (\), like this:

	\# \$ \% \& \_ \{ \}

These characters are also reserved:

	~ ^ \ < >

Often, if you think you want one of these characters, you probably want to do something else.

• ~ can be produced in several ways. If you want a tilde over a character, like ñ, you can type \~{n} or \~n. If you want a mathematical $\sim$ you can type $\sim$ (which stands for similar to). More often you will want the $\sim$ within another math expression anyhow; for more detail see Section 8 below.
• ^ can likewise mean circumflex, as in ô which is produced with \^{o} or \^o. In math mode you would use \hat{o} to indicate a unit vector.
• \ is not used very often in normal writing, but you can type $\backslash$ if you want to use it.
• < and > can be written as $<$ and $>$. If you insert these symbols in your document without quoting them as described here, they will appear as upside-down exclamation points (<) and question marks (>).