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LaTeX sets aside the following characters for special purposes. For
example, the percent sign % is for comments. They are
called reserved characters or special characters.
# $ % & { } _ ~ ^ \
If you want a reserved character to be printed as itself, in the text
body font, for all but the final three characters in that list simply
put a backslash \ in front of the character. Thus,
typing \$1.23 will produce $1.23 in your output.
As to the last three characters, to get a tilde in the text body font
use \~{} (omitting the curly braces would result in the next
character receiving a tilde accent). Similarly, to get a get a text
body font circumflex use \^{}. To get a backslash in the font
of the text body, enter \textbackslash{}.
To produce the reserved characters in a typewriter font use
\verb!! as below (the double backslash \\ is only
there to split the lines).
\begin{center}
\# \$ \% \& \{ \} \_ \~{} \^{} \textbackslash \\
\verb!# $ % & { } _ ~ ^ \!
\end{center}