[OS X TeX] elsarticle

[Themis Matsoukas]

This could be a bug in elsarticle.cls (in which case I apologize for  
the OT nature of the question), or maybe there is a latex way around  
it. The problem: I need to print an underscore inside a custom command  
(\ead{}) of elsarticle.cls, the Elsevier latex package (for those  
interested, \ead{} prints the author's email address and my co- 
author's address has an underscore). I tried the following and they   
failed:

1. \ead{ ... \url{_} ... }
2. \ead{ ... \_ ...}

#1 generated errors in compilation; #2 compiled but instead of an  
underscore I got the strange sequence  "_ _11_". Are there other ways  
force an underscore?

Here is a minimal example (to see the problem you need to look at the  
bottom of the pdf page that is generated):

\documentclass{elsarticle}
\usepackage{url}
\begin{document}
\begin{frontmatter}
\title{Title}
\author{John Doe}\ead{x\_xz at whatever.com}
\end{frontmatter}
\end{document}

TIA

Themis Matsoukas
matsoukas at engr.psu.edu