I have a LaTeX file for a book chapter, which may need to be converted to Word at some point, because that is what the publishers use (sigh). This article doesn't have any math in it, but I'm still using LaTeX, because even when not writing mathematics, it is better than the alternatives. Unfortunately, I'm making heavy use of characters that are only supposed to appear inside a math environment, notably the underscore character (_
). I do use the math environment in a couple of places, but only very briefly.
So, my question is, can I tell LaTeX to make an exception for this specific character, and actually treat the underscore as a underscore? This would make later conversion to Word or some other word processing format easier. The alternative is to use \_
in lots of places. Bonus points if there is some way to still use underscore inside a math environment, not sure how that would work. To be clear, I'd like a general technique that would work with any of the special LaTex characters, though I suppose remapping most of the other ones would cause more trouble than it was worth.
I'm not sure what tags to use here, so please feel free to add. Thanks.
EDIT: It turns out this is a FAQ - How to typeset an underscore character.