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September 16

LaTeX backslash encoding

"The not so short introduction to LaTeX 2e" tells the reader:

LaTeX supports the use of accents and special characters from many languages. Table 2.2 shows all sorts of accents being applied to the letter o. Naturally other letters work too.

The table shows them constructed via backslashes; so for example \"o produces ö. The same Table 2.2 also obligingly describes how to construct several o-irrelevant characters, such as å. But not all. (As an example, I happen to know something not in the table: \th produces þ.) Yes, the introduction goes on to say that now that "modern TEX engines [speak] UTF-8 natively" this cumbersome way of specifying characters can be avoided. Understood. But all the same I'd like to see a more comprehensive list or table of these recipes for single (Roman or Roman-derived) characters. Though we have an article "Percent-encoding", I can't find "backslash-encoding" here; and googling for this brings numerous pages on irrelevancies (notably how to produce backslashes that are just backslashes). Tips? -- Hoary (talk) 09:38, 16 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Does The Comprehensive LaTeX Symbol List help? --Wrongfilter (talk) 09:53, 16 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Blimey, Wrongfilter, I knew that a comprehensive list would be big, but I hadn't imagined that it would be that big. Excellent. This should answer all my questions, plus a few thousand more. -- Hoary (talk) 10:14, 16 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]