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#### 11.7.1 Special symbols

You can use LaTeX-like syntax to insert special symbols like ‘`\alpha`’ to indicate the Greek letter, or ‘`\to`’ to indicate an arrow. Completion for these symbols is available, just type ‘`\`’ and maybe a few letters, and press `M-TAB` to see possible completions. Unlike LaTeX code, Org mode allows these symbols to be present without surrounding math delimiters, for example:

    Angles are written as Greek letters \alpha, \beta and \gamma.

During export, these symbols will be transformed into the native format of the exporter back-end. Strings like `\alpha` will be exported as `&alpha;` in the HTML output, and as `$\alpha$` in the LaTeX output. Similarly, `\nbsp` will become `&nbsp;` in HTML and `~` in LaTeX. If you need such a symbol inside a word, terminate it like this: ‘`\Aacute{}stor`’.

A large number of entities is provided, with names taken from both HTML and LaTeX; see the variable `org-entities` for the complete list. ‘`\-`’ is treated as a shy hyphen, and ‘`--`’, ‘`---`’, and ‘`...`’ are all converted into special commands creating hyphens of different lengths or a compact set of dots.

If you would like to see entities displayed as UTF-8 characters, use the following command126:

`C-c C-x \`

  Toggle display of entities as UTF-8 characters. This does not change the buffer content which remains plain ASCII, but it overlays the UTF-8 character for display purposes only.

#### Footnotes

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You can turn this on by default by setting the variable `org-pretty-entities`, or on a per-file base with the `#+STARTUP` option `entitiespretty`.

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