Question: Can't get backslash to work as escape character

Hello everyone (new here, nice place).

I'm working through the Introductory Programming Guide in the 'Manuals' section of the online Help in Maple 13.0 and so far the soup has been at a satisfactory temperature but now I've run into a problem using the backslash as an Escape character as in the examples at 'Special Characters in Names' in '2.2 Tokens' subsection 'Names'.

Specifically I can't make the example

`a\'b`;

work as it should when I type it into a work sheet (I'm using the key to left of 'Z' on my keyboard and I've also tried Alt + 92 which is the backslash's ASCII code). I get the error message 'Error, invalid minus' but when I click on that to get a Maplesoft webpage I'm told this specific error message isn't addressed.

The strange thing is that if I copy and paste from the manual I can get it to work (so at least I have a workround available to me but it's troublesome of course) and I notice that when I do that the backslash doesn't slash back as much as it does as when I use the backslash key (i.e. it looks to be a different character).

Any ideas from anyone about this curious behaviour? I'm using Windows 'Vista' and an UK English keyboard input (and I have tried switching to both an American and Canadian keyboard input to no avail).

Help appreciated.