General ⇒ Backslash issue

[kpmryan!]

Hi everyone,

Sorry, Im pretty new to this, everything was going really smoothly for the past week or so, but when I try to use the backslash it appears as the less than symbol! What did I do and how and I change it.

Thanks for the help

[Stefan Kottwitz]

Hi kpmryan,

welcome to the board!
Try \textbackslash. If that doesn't work, tell us, how you are loading fontenc and what font you are using.

Stefan

[kpmryan!]

Thanks for the speedy response. I guess to be more clear, Im writting in a .tex file, trying to write something like \section{whatever}, but when I hit backslah it appears as < in the .tex file. Essentially making it impossible to do anything in LaTeX.

Is it possible that it is in math mode as opposed to paragraph mode??? Even though I have used the \start{equation} or \[ commands?

[Stefan Kottwitz]

Check if the keyboard configuration of your operating system is correct. It seems to me that the keyboad layout is not correctly configured. Can you type the backslash in other programs?

Stefan

[kpmryan!]

Unfortunately, the backslash works fine in other programs...

I have no idea right now.

Maybe you were right about the font issue. How can you change the font that is displayed within the .tex file and what font should I be using. Maybe somehow I changed the font that I am writing within the .tex file and that is what is messing it up.

[Stefan Kottwitz]

I understand the backslash is not working in your LaTeX editor only. What editor are you using?

Stefan

[kpmryan!]

Im writting in TeXnicCenter.

[kpmryan!]

Let me add on something else, here are a few other buttons and their results. Everything else seems to be working fine.

Type Get
[ nothing
[[ ^
{ nothing
{{ ^
] nothing
]] ,,
} nothing
}} ,,
\ <
| >

Wierd eh.

[Stefan Kottwitz]

I'm using Linux at the moment, so I cannot look at TeXnicCenter. Because the keys are working fine like you said it's just a TeXnicCenter issue.
There seems to be a misconfiguration of the keyboard. Without Windows I cannot say more at the moment.
I will move the topic to the TeXnicCenter subforum to make the problem clearer, it's not a LaTeX issue. Readers will also find it there over View active topics.
I hope somebody with TeXnicCenter installed will give useful advice.

Stefan

[sylme]

Hi,
I'm having this exact same problem. It seems to crop up more when I am editing, so I don't know if it is a key combination that is close to (or involving) ctrl+x, ctrl+c, ctrl+v or maybe delete and end?

I'm using a brand new laptop with vista. I *never* had this problem on my old laptop (running xp and an older version of texniccenter) which I used for exactly the same kind of work for over 4 years. On the other hand, it happened to me 4 times within the space of an hour yesterday afternoon. The only solution seems to be to restart texnic.

Has anyone figured this out? Or should I just try installing an older version of texnic?