Is there a way to escape special characters in filenames passed to externalfigure. I'm encountering the situation where users are choosing images that may contain brackets or curly braces (e.g., flower[1].jpg or flower{1}.jpg). If I pass filename containing these characters directly to externalfigure, the closing bracket is mistaken for the end of the filename. \externalfigure[flower{1}.jpg] % works \externalfigure[flower[1].jpg] % doesn't work I then tried to define a variable that holds the filename and pass that variable to externalfigure, but it ran into problems with curly braces. \def\myimagefilename{flower[1].jpg} \externalfigure[\myimagefilename] % works \def\myimagefilename{flower{1}.jpg} \externalfigure[\myimagefilename] % doesn't work Does anyone have any idea how I could handle arbitrary filename inputs that contain brackets and curly braces? Cheers, Mike