The symbol "~" is not showing up

Question

I am trying to type the symbol "~" in normal text, but it is not showing up. Why is this?

Answer 1

~ is a latex special character for a non-breaking space. \textasciitilde is the command to produce ~ (in the default OT1 font there is no ~ so in that case it falls back to use the tilde accent over an empty base \~{}) but other font encodings do have a low ~.