Time for action – writing special characters in our text

We will write a very short example printing out an amount of dollars and a percent number, then we shall try more symbols:

1. Create a new document and enter the following lines:

   \documentclass{article}
   \begin{document}
   Statement \#1:
   50\% of \$100 makes \$50.
   More special symbols are \&, \_, \{ and \}.
   \end{document}

2. Typeset and view the output:

   

What just happened?

By putting a backslash before such a special symbol, we turned it into a LaTeX command. This command has the only purpose of printing out that symbol.

Note

The command for printing a backslash is \textbackslash. If you would like to know what \\ might be used for, it is used as a shortcut for a line break command. That's a bit odd, but line breaks occur frequently whereas backslashes are rarely needed in the output, therefore this shortcut has been chosen.

There's a wealth of symbols that we can use for math formulas, chess notation, zodiac signs, music scores, and more. We don...