@TeXtip

Tweets on TeX, LaTeX, and typography. @JohnDCook.

 Houston
JohnDCook.com
Joined April 2010
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Use \phantom{} to insert white space the size of the argument. For example, \phantom{\pi} is an invisible \pi.
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The commands for capital Greek letters are the letter name in capital case. e.g. \Gamma, \Delta, etc.
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You cannot use \\ to produce a backslash. Use $\backslash$ instead.
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TeX and Typography retweeted
Algebra Etc.@AlgebraFactOct 14
LaTeX package for displaying Pascal-like triangles, such as the illustration above. johndcook.com/blog/2026/10/1…

LaTeX package for Pascal-like triangles

LaTeX package to make it easier to create illustrations of Pascal's triangle and similar triangles such as Bell's triangle, Leibniz' triangle, etc.

johndcook.com
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Bidirectional text johndcook.com/blog/2020/10/0…

Simple bidirectional text

How to use basic bidirectional text. Inserting control characters to force text to be displayed left-to-right or right-to-left.

johndcook.com
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In math mode, use \{ and \} to produce { and }.
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Use an en-dash rather than a hyphen for numerical ranges. e.g. pages 3--10.
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Differential equation direction plots in TeX tex.stackexchange.com/questi…
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Zareba, asterims, and dinkus johndcook.com/blog/2021/06/0…

Section separation symbols zabera, asterism, and dinkus

Occasionally I will use a row of three asterisks to indicate the separation between the body of a blog post and the footnotes, as I did in my previous post. *** This page quotes a typesetter who said...

johndcook.com
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TeX and Typography retweeted
heiner
@HeinrichKuttlerOct 7
I nerded out a bit and let Claude recreate the 1947 look in LaTeX.
Anthony Bonato
@Anthony_BonatoOct 3
Which looks better to you?
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In Emacs, you can toggle between showing LaTeX commands and the symbols they produce with prettify-symbols-mode.
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The commands for lower case Greek letters are the letter name in lower case. e.g. \alpha, \beta, etc.
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Use \! to insert a NEGATIVE thin space in math mode, i.e. to pull things together. e.g. \int \! \int
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Annuity and factorial notation johndcook.com/blog/2025/07/2…

Annuity and factorial notation

Two uses of bracket notation: actuarial symbols related to annuities and an obsolete notation for factorial

johndcook.com
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Use \> to insert a medium space in math mode, \; to insert a thick space.
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TeX uses $$ to begin and end math display mode. In LaTeX, \[ and \] are recommended instead.
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Mirroring text in LaTeX texblog.org/2013/11/19/mirro… by @thurnherr

Mirroring text in LaTeX - texblog

LaTeX has plenty of hidden treasures and it seems the graphics bundle is particular rich in surprises. For example, the package can crop figures on the fly (see my previous post). Recently, I was...

texblog.org
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Unicode superscripts and subscripts johndcook.com/blog/2021/10/3…

Unicode superscripts and subscripts

There are Unicode characters for superscripts and subscripts up to 9.

johndcook.com
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GNU Unifont has glyphs for every printable code point in the Unicode 9.0 Basic Multilingual Plane unifoundry.com/unifont.html
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In prose, use \$, \%, \&, and \# to produce $, %, &, and #.
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