Yeah, that's a major issue with the current state of the text parsing currently: the special symbols ($, @, etc.) are not recognized when preceded by most characters. You have to write "+ $1" instead of "+$1" until I get around to overhauling things.
As for lining up, if you mean vertically, unfortunately different browsers just aren't very consistent with their text rendering. Desktop Chrome on Windows is what I do most of my testing in, and that's where the text will come out looking the most authentic. Other browsers will display things at subtly different sizes, different offsets, and so on, in ways that are not ideal but generally close enough.