Possible ways to format a specific century in LaTeX?

Question

I'm writing I little bit of history in my report and I wonder which are the possible ways to format a century in LaTeX (e.g XX century) and in typography which is the most used and accepted. This is actually what I'm using:

XX$^{\circ}$ so I have something like XX° but I don't like it very much, the circle is too low...

Answer 1

The ordinal indicators º/º and ª/ª can be typeset with \textsuperscript{o} and \textsuperscript{a} respectively.

While the french option of babel actually uses a \realsuperscript macro that aligns the superscripts a little bit lower, the italian option doesn’t have this.

An alternative offers the input of Unicode characters with the utf8 option of the inputenc package (of course, you need to have your documents UTF-8 encoded).

The textcomp packages defines \textordmasculine and \textordfeminine which do look a little different and are underlined.

Code

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[italian]{babel}
\let\up\textsuperscript
\begin{document}
20\up{o} secolo\par 20º secolo \par
20\up{a} Vespa\par 20ª Vespa
\end{document}

Output

Answer 2

I see no problem with using XX as 20th century... but if you want to change it a little bit you should only change its style, for example:

\emph{XX} Century
\textsl{XX} Century
\textbf{XX} Century
\texttt{XX} Century
\textsc{XX} Century

Which would look something like this:

Of course, feel free to combine (keeping of course esthetics and reason on sight) any of the options below.

Answer 3

I disagree with @Mario S. E.' s answer (Nothing personal :-), which proposses to use \text<sth> macros to format the century numbers. I would nearly never use them in the document body, especially when they are used for mark up, as it is the case here. Even mixing them isn't a good idea either. You could instead do:

\documentclass{article}
\def\centuryname{century}
\let\up\textsuperscript
\let\markcent\textsc
  \newcommand*{\century}[1]
  {\markcent{\uppercase\expandafter{\romannumeral #1\relax}}\up{o} \centuryname}

\begin{document}
\century{20}
\end{document}

(with credits to @Qrrbrbirlbel' s answer).

Edit: Regarding the position of the 'o' etc., try another definition for \up. Replace \let\up\textsuperscript with

\def\up#1{%
\edef\tmp{\the\fontdimen14\textfont2}%
\fontdimen14\textfont2=5.5pt%
\textsuperscript{#1}%
\fontdimen14\textfont2=\tmp%
}

Finally, you could code a little more customizability by

\newcommand*{\up}[2][5.5pt]{%
\edef\tmp{\the\fontdimen14\textfont2}%
\fontdimen14\textfont2=#1%
\textsuperscript{#2}%
\fontdimen14\textfont2=\tmp%
}

which then could be used like \up[height correction]{superscript}.