# More on: Your first LaTeX document

## Running LaTeX

As detailed earlier, LaTeX documents are simply plain text. To see this, try opening your first document in a simple text editor, for example on Windows using Notepad. You should see the same text as in a dedicated LaTeX editor, but without any highlight of keywords.

You can also convert to PDF without your editor; this means using the Command Prompt/Terminal, so don’t worry if you are not familiar with this. If you are, you can navigate to the directory containing your `.tex` source file and run

`pdflatex first`

or

`pdflatex first.tex`

to typeset your PDF. Notice that the `.tex` extension is optional: LaTeX will assume files end with`.tex` unless you specify otherwise.

## Special characters

If you need to type in a special character, most of the time you can simply use a backslash in front of it, so for example `\{` is used to print a literal `{`. There are a few cases where you need to use a longer command instead:

 Symbol Short Command (math and text) Long Command (for text only) `{` `\{` `\textbraceleft` `}` `\}` `\textbraceright` `\$` `\\$` `\textdollar` `%` `\%` `&` `\&` `#` `\#` `_` `\_` `\textunderscore` `\` `\textbackslash` `^` `\textasciicircum` `~` `\textasciitilde`

For the last three symbols there are no short commands available, because `\\` is used to indicate a linebreak and `\~` and `\^` are used to produce tilde and circumflex accents when using only ASCII characters as input.