Tilde

[Christopher Manning]

Not quoting The Comprehensive Latex Symbol List, I'd give the following advice:

\~{} and $\sim$ both look awful.  Don't do it to yourself.  Just using ~ is 
at least invisible :-).

\usepackage{textcomp} \texttildelow should be the right answer but in 
practice it suffers both from inconsistency as to at what height the tilde 
appears depending on the font (very bad for bib files) and from the fact 
that the resulting character cannot be successfully copy-and-pasted or 
searched for in PDF documents derived from TeX.

So, what I actually recommend using is \texttt{\~}. The font match may not 
be perfect, but it's better than a CMR \texttildelow hugging the baseline, 
and your readers will appreciate being able to copy-and-paste your URLs.

Chris.



On 9/11/2006 7:27 PM, Ulrich Germann wrote:
> Let me just quote from "The Comprehensive Latex Symbol List":
> 
>> \textasciitilde and \~{} produce raised, diacritic tildes. “Text” (i.e.,
>> vertically centered) tildes can be generated with either the math-mode \sim
>> command (shown in Table 54 on page 25), which produces a somewhat wide “”, or
>> the textcomp package’s \texttildelow (shown in Table 36 on page 18), which
>> produces a vertically centered “~” in most fonts but a baseline-oriented
>> “~” in Computer Modern, txfonts, pxfonts, and various other fonts originating
>> from the TEX world. If your goal is to typeset tildes in URLs or Unix
>> filenames, your best bet is to use the url package, which has a number of nice
>> features such as proper line-breaking of such names.
> 
> Regards - Ulrich Germann
> 
> On 09/11/06 17:28, David Spollen wrote:
>> Dear all,
>>
>> I am looking to be able to put a tilde character into a bibtex entry as follows:
>>
>> www.xxx.ie/~spollend/spollend
>>
>> Anyone have any ideas as to how this can be done?
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>> David Spollen
>>
>>
>> --
>> David Spollen
>> B.A. (mod) Computer Science, Linguistics and French
>> MSc by research in Computational Linguistics
>> Computational Linguistics Group (CLG)
>> Lloyd Institute - room 116
>> Trinity College, Dublin 2
>> www.cs.tcd.ie/~spollend
>> Tel: (01) 6088435
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>