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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 α
in the HTML output, and as \(\alpha\)
in the LaTeX output.
Similarly, \nbsp
becomes
in HTML and ~
in
LaTeX.
Entities may also be used as a may to escape markup in an Org document, e.g., ‘\under{}not underlined\under’ exports as ‘_not underlined_’.
If you would like to see entities displayed as UTF-8 characters, use the following command118:
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 way119 the following commonly used character combinations: ‘\-’ is treated as a shy hyphen, ‘--’ and ‘---’ are converted into dashes, and ‘...’ becomes a compact set of dots.
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
.
This behavior can be disabled with -
export setting
(see Export settings).
Next: Subscripts and superscripts, Previous: Literal examples, Up: Markup [Contents][Index]