OurBigBook Docs
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 shorthand syntax:
<(open angle brackets, less than sign): macro shorthand syntax for shorthand internal links$(dollar sign): macro shorthand syntax for mathematics`(backtick): macro shorthand syntax for code blocks#(hash): shorthand topic links
Furthermore, only at:you must also escape the following macros with shorthand syntax:
- 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