Special characters in LaTeX

[kellijohnson-NOAA]

Often, I am vexed by errors in my rmarkdown that lead to errors in LaTeX based on unknown, well at least unknown to me, rules of LaTeX. So, as a reminder for myself; here, is a list of special characters that should be escaped in rmarkdown because they will need to be escaped in LaTeX.

Character	Description	Function	To Typeset
#	octothorp	Macro parameter character	\#
$	dollar sign	Start/end inline math mode	\$
%	percent sign	Comment character	\%
&	ampersand	Column separator	\&
_	underscore	Subscripts, as in $x_2$	\_
{,}	braces	Parameters	\{, \}
˜	tilde	Non breaking space	\~{}
ˆ	caret	Superscripts, as in $x^2$	\^{}
\	backslash	Starts commands	\verb

Feel free to directly edit this table if you know of any characters that I missed.