My good friend Dr. Tom Remenyi just sent me a little LaTeX hack that I thought would be worth sharing. He recently found himself in need of a tilde, that is a ‘~’ and quickly became frustrated with the standard/default LaTeX rendering and as such decided to define his own. Here’s how you can to…

## What is a tilde?

tilde (~ , pronounced TILL-duh or TILL-dee and sometimes called a “twiddle” or a “squiggle”) is a foundational mathematical symbol meaning “approximately” and in much of computer science logic means “not.”

## Dr.Tom’s instructions:

What follows is a direct quote of his email to me:

For years it has bugged me that using the tilde symbol in latex is a real pain, solutions have been never quite right. I have needed to use it quite a bit in a recent document, so I have found a solution. I thought I would share it, since I like it so much. I hope one of you find this useful.

Below is a line of code you can add to the preamble of any document and it will define a command that will place a sensibly sized and positioned tilde where you want it. (I have quite figured out where I can put it so it always works and doesn’t get overwritten by new packages). Why this isn’t the default (or close to the default), I don’t know, but here it is.


\newcommand{\goodtilde}}  %create a command that uses a decent ~ (tilde) in-text.



It is used like this throughout the latex of the document:

There are \goodtilde50 excellent reasons why this should be the default symbol in latex.

OR

This is the way to put a \goodtilde symbol in your text.