Yield symbol (chemistry)

Question

I'm trying to format a chemical reaction with LaTeX, and apparently it doesn't accept "→" as a character. Is there any way to do it?

Answer 1

Usually such an arrow is created using \to in mathmode which is also accessible as \rightarrow. Dexify also lists \textrightarrow (for text mode), \shortrightarrow and \longrightarrow.

Using the right settings you should also be able to use → as an unicode character directly. This, however, depends also on the used compiler (PDFLaTeX, LuaLaTeX or XeLaTeX).

You should however consider to use a dedicated package for chemical reaction, for example mhchem. There is also chemarrow which provides arrows for chemical reactions, but it seems a little outdated (2001). For more LaTeX packages about chemistry see the list on CTAN.