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21.1 Reserved characters

The following characters play a special role in LaTeX and are called “reserved characters” or “special characters”.

     # $ % & ~ _ ^ \ { }

Whenever you write one of these characters into your file, LaTeX will do something special. If you simply want the character to be printed as itself, include a \ in front of the character. For example, \$ will produce $ in your output.

One exception to this rule is \ itself, because \\ has its own special (context-dependent) meaning. A roman \ is produced by typing $\backslash$ in your file, and a typewriter \ is produced by using ‘\’ in a verbatim command (see verbatim).

Also, \~ and \^ place tilde and circumflex accents over the following letter, as in õ and ô (see Accents); to get a standalone ~ or ^, you can again use a verbatim command.

Finally, you can access any character of the current font once you know its number by using the \symbol command. For example, the visible space character used in the \verb* command has the code decimal 32, so it can be typed as \symbol{32}.

You can also specify octal numbers with ' or hexadecimal numbers with ", so the previous example could also be written as \symbol{'40} or \symbol{"20}.