Special Symbols (The Org Manual)

Next: Embedded LaTeX, Previous: Subscripts and Superscripts, Up: Markup for Rich Contents [Contents][Index]

### 12.4 Special Symbols

You can use LaTeX-like syntax to insert special symbols—named entities—like ‘`\alpha`’ to indicate the Greek letter, or ‘`\to`’ to indicate an arrow. Completion for these symbols is available, just type ‘`\`’ and maybe a few letters, and press `M-TAB` to see possible completions. If you need such a symbol inside a word, terminate it with a pair of curly brackets. For example

    Pro tip: Given a circle \Gamma of diameter d, the length of its
    circumference is \pi{}d.

A large number of entities is provided, with names taken from both HTML and LaTeX; you can comfortably browse the complete list from a dedicated buffer using the command `org-entities-help`. It is also possible to provide your own special symbols in the variable `org-entities-user`.

During export, these symbols are transformed into the native format of the exporter back-end. Strings like ‘`\alpha`’ are exported as ‘`&alpha;`’ in the HTML output, and as ‘`\(\alpha\)`’ in the LaTeX output. Similarly, ‘`\nbsp`’ becomes ‘`&nbsp;`’ in HTML and ‘`~`’ in LaTeX.

If you would like to see entities displayed as UTF-8 characters, use the following command106:

`C-c C-x \` (`org-toggle-pretty-entities`)

  Toggle display of entities as UTF-8 characters. This does not change the buffer content which remains plain ASCII, but it overlays the UTF-8 character for display purposes only.

In addition to regular entities defined above, Org exports in a special way107 the following commonly used character combinations: ‘`\-`’ is treated as a shy hyphen, ‘`--`’ and ‘`---`’ are converted into dashes, and ‘`...`’ becomes a compact set of dots.

#### Footnotes

### (106)

You can turn this on by default by setting the variable `org-pretty-entities`, or on a per-file base with the ‘`STARTUP`’ option ‘`entitiespretty`’.

### (107)

This behavior can be disabled with ‘`-`’ export setting (see Export Settings).

Next: Embedded LaTeX, Previous: Subscripts and Superscripts, Up: Markup for Rich Contents [Contents][Index]