Every character that cannot be a macro identifier can be escaped with a backslash
\
. If you try to escape a macro identifier it of course treats the thing as a macro instead and fails, e.g. in \a
it would try to use a macro called \a
, not escape the character a
.For some characters, escaping or not does not make any difference because they don't have any meaning to OurBigBook Markup, e.g. currently
%
is always the exact same as \%
.But in non-literal macro arguments, you have to use a backslash to escape the following if you want them to not have any magical meaning:
\
: backslashes start macros\[
and\]
: open and close positional macro arguments\{
and\}
: open and close optional macro arguments- escapes for macros with insane shortcut:
<
(open angle brackets, less than sign): insane macro shortcut for insane internal links$
(dollar sign): insane macro shortcut for mathematics`
(backtick): insane macro shortcut for code blocks#
(hash): insane topic links
Furthermore, only at:you must also escape the following macros with insane shortcut:
- at the start of the document
- after a newline
- at the start of a new argument
The escape rules for literal arguments are described at: Section "Literal arguments".
This is good for short arguments of regular text, but for longer blocks like code blocks or mathematics, you may want to use literal arguments