# Producing isolated accents

Is it possible to produce isolated accents, with no letters under it?

I'm looking for these characters in specific:  ~ ^ ´ ˆ ˜ ¨

• If you are searching for special characters, you can always look at detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html Dec 20 '11 at 16:23
• Really interesting site... I'll surely bookmark it! Dec 20 '11 at 16:32

You can generate the accent like you would normally, only use a space as the letter to apply it to. As an example, consider the following:

\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
$\tilde{ }$ $\hat{ }$ \'{ }
\end{document}


Which looks like this:

There's no need to go in math mode:

\{} \'{} \^{} \~{} \v{} \u{} \.{}


are various examples: just tell TeX to put the accent over nothing.

In case of XeLaTeX and some individual accent characters in Greek (e.g. Psili - Unicode U+1FBF) it is posisble to ensure the character is not combined with the preceding letter using the following trick:

ἐπ\/᾿\ \ ὀλίγον


Which renders correctly as "ἐπ᾿ ὀλίγον" instead of π combined with Psili.

• Note that Unicode has the non-combining psili ᾿ (U+1FBF) and also might support adding the combining accent to a non-breaking space (^^^^00a0 or ~) Dec 9 '20 at 22:42

In Unicode, the canonical way to do this is to combine the accent with a non-breaking space (U+00A0). In TeX, a non-breaking space is ~,

There are also Unicode codepoints for many non-combining accents.