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I want to write something basic like "10 $US" but sometimes it makes the text look weird. It changes the font and writes italic text. And sometimes it will insert a newline. For example in my answer for this question.
How can I safely insert a dollar sign?
Many Stack Exchange sites which involve a strong use of mathematics will have MathJax enabled for easily creating mathematical formulas. This script uses the dollar sign as a beginning and ending delimiter, so you will have to escape them like so: \$
$ every time but it looks ugly as hell.
Jun 1, 2020 at 6:41
On a site where math mode is available by using a dollar sign—as well as on a site where math mode is not available—you can write a range of five to ten dollars by escaping each dollar sign with a backslash (\$5-\$10). You will see the symbols that you intended.
However, on a site where math mode is available by using a dollar sign, if you don't use a backslash before each dollar sign ($5-$10), you see the sequence five, dash, one, zero. The five and the dash get formatted in math mode.
Recall that, when expressing a numeric range, you may wish to use a typographic en dash, rather than a hyphen-minus character. One way to specify that is an XML-style character reference (\$5–\$10).
On a site where math mode is available by using a dollar sign, by accidentally using the XML-style character reference in math mode $5–$10, you would produce an error.
We can clarify what's happening, by investigating a little further. Spoiler: We won't find useful techniques in this direction.
Recall that, in math mode, there is an escape command (\text{xyz}). Escaped text in math mode will be formatted as text.
Escaped text in math mode clearly has an appearance that is clearly different from formatting as mathematics, the formatting that occurs when the escape command is not used ($xyz$). When formatted as mathematics, letters display in italics. They are spaced differently from letters as text.
Inside that escape command, neither LaTeX syntax for the en dash (--) nor XML-style syntax for the en dash (–) will be understood. If you try them ($5\text{--7–}$10), those constructs will be treated only as text character data inside math mode.
In markdown editors such as GitHub, or Jupyter notebook, with MathJax available, you can use double backslash and a dollar sign together to show any amount or range of amount in the dollar.
Note that, in StackExchange or any StackOverflow related site, a single backslash is enough. So I couldn't show you the double backslash, because this editor refuse to show double backslash together.
`$` - code insertion worked for me in something like MathJax. Just \$ was printed as is.
\$as formula delimiters, so on those sites the lone $ will render normally. But on most, $ is a MathJax delimiter.