Question

While writing in LaTeX, I happened to type something like “$ variable = test” as a text. However, LaTeX said something like: Missing $ ..

I tried putting \ before the $ and other math symbols, but it still messed up the shape of the text.

My question is: how can I instruct LaTeX that this whole paragraph or sentence, is pure text, and no math in it?

Also, away from this, when I try adding the symbol ” | ” it shows it as double underscore ” __ “. How to solve this?

Thanks!

Answer 1

You can use \textdollar{} to insert a text dollar. (Though \$ ought to work too; and I’m not sure why it doesn’t for you.) And you can specify that something should be reproduced verbatim, and typeset in a tt font, by using \verb and the same character to surround it, e.g. \verb+|+ or \verb=$=.

The real issue here seems to be that you’re typesetting some code in LaTeX: for this, use package listings, or one of the other packages for code listings.