@TeXtip

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

 Houston
JohnDCook.com
Joined April 2010
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How many possible Unicode characters are there? Why? johndcook.com/blog/2019/09/0…

Number of possible Unicode characters

What is the maximum number of characters that Unicode can have? Why do they have the restrictions that they do?

johndcook.com
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Can use \^ to put a circumflex on the following letter. e.g. r\^ole produces rôle
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Greek has two versions of sigma. \sigma is the most common version. \varsigma is the sigma used at the end of a word.
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The command for a product is \prod, not \Pi.
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Number sets in Unicode and HTML johndcook.com/blog/2021/11/0…

Number sets in HTML and Unicode | Double-struck letters

There are Unicode characters for the sets of real numbers, integers, quaternions, etc. and each has a couple corresponding HTML entities.

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The amsfonts package supplies blackboard math letters, such as \mathbb{R} for the real numbers, as well as other fonts.
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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.

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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.

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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...

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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

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