Rules / Build

Misplaced alignment tab character & — Unescaped & in text

& separates table columns and cannot appear in running text or a .bib field unescaped.

Fix

Write \&.

Example

Reproduced on TeX Live 2026 by CI · pdflatex · corpus/ampersand-in-text

Unescaped & in running text

Fails: main.tex
\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
This work was funded by the Research & Development office.
\end{document}
Fixed
\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
This work was funded by the Research \& Development office.
\end{document}
What TeX prints in main.log
! Misplaced alignment tab character &.
l.3 This work was funded by the Research &
                                           Development office.
I can't figure out why you would want to use a tab mark
here. If you just want an ampersand, the remedy is
simple: Just type `I\&' now. But if some right brace
up above has ended a previous alignment prematurely,
you're probably due for more error messages, and you
might try typing `S' now just to see what is salvageable.