UMIST: ISD: Intro to [La]TeX

11. Some Fundamentals

TeX and LaTeX reserve some characters for its own use:

    #   $   %   &   ~   _   ^   \  {   }

These should not appear as part of your text: if they do TeX will get confused. Instead use

    \#    \$    ...

All TeX commands:

Some commands have arguments, some don't:

\begin{document}
Here is an {\it italicised phrase\/} in the middle of a sentence.
\end{document}