How do I set the tilde (~) character correctly in LaTeX?
There’s a question discussing that on Stack Overflow, with a lot of answers. But dare I say it? They all suck:
\textasciitilde
is too high,\texttildelow
is too low.$\sim$
can be tweaked to look more or less acceptable:{\raise.17ex\hbox{$\scriptstyle\sim$}}
– but even that is a hack and uses the wrong symbol.
The point is – the tilde character is definitely an existing glyph in any font I am tempted to use. How can I just access and typeset that character, please? Without resorting to some other, similar-looking glyph that first needs to be nudged into place using a cunning combination of font size and raised boxes?
There must be a possibility to access that glyph directly from the font definition.
To demonstrate, look at this screenshot which attempts simply to display a C++ destructor of a type T
(~T
):
Compare this with the symbol we get in the browser: ~
– that’s what I want.
Best Answer
It all depends on what do you want this glyph to stand for.
If you want to use it in an url then add
\usepackage{url}
(orhyperref
) to your preamble and then use\url{http://example.com/~user}
.If you want to use it inside a math formula as some kind of relation then use
$a \sim b$
.According to the "Comprehensive Symbols List", to get a vertically centered
~
you can use\texttildelow
in any font other than Computer Modern, txfonts, and pxfonts. For example the following does the trick for typesetting a C++ destructor