How do you get a non-italic pound sign? (£)

Question

This is available in Table 3: LaTeX2e Commands Defined to Work in Both Math and Text Mode (p 14) of The Comprehensive LaTeX Symbol List (discussed within the duplicate link). — Werner, Dec 25 '16 at 06:46
@Werner I think it's completely wrong to close this as a dup of the general question, there are specific issues for \pounds in the cm fonts related to the fact that it is the $ in the italic font. (not to mention the fact that it's not typically a math symbol at all) — David Carlisle, Dec 25 '16 at 11:23
Possible duplicate: How to look up a symbol or identify a math symbol or character? — Werner, Dec 25 '16 at 15:56

score 17 · Answer 1 · answered Dec 25 '16 at 01:56

17

In the original cm fonts (OT1 encoding) £ was encoded as italic $ but in the 8bit encoding (T1) it is not an issue:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\begin{document}

\pounds\ and \textit{\pounds}

\end{document}

answered Dec 25 '16 at 01:56

David Carlisle

757,742

I get an upright/non-italic £ with T1 and OT1. I still think this is a duplicate. – Werner Dec 25 '16 at 16:00
@Werner yes latex goes to some efforts to use the upright italic font in OT1 \pounds (but I half suspect the OP is using plain tex, otherwise the question wouldn't have arisen:-) – David Carlisle Dec 25 '16 at 16:29
@David. Works with T1, but the PDF looks really bad. Like a scanned document. – Daniel Dec 26 '16 at 02:56
@Nico. Not sure, I guess it's cm. – Daniel Dec 26 '16 at 02:56
@Daniel: This is the zoomed-in quality I get without loading fontenc. – Werner Dec 26 '16 at 03:18
Makes me want to give up the whole thing and go back to stupid Word. Can't even post proper comments. – Daniel Dec 26 '16 at 05:14
@Daniel If you are getting pixelated fonts you have a badly configured setup using bitmap fonts. But that would be unlikely to just affect \pounds? I t should be using scalable fonts so smooth outlines as in the images Werner and I posted – David Carlisle Dec 26 '16 at 10:19
All right, I gave up and went back to stupid Words, too many problems with LaTeX. I installed the cmr font in Word, looks OK, but no accented letters such as ü and é. It changes to Cambria with those. Sigh. – Daniel Dec 26 '16 at 19:13
@Daniel if you want a font similar to cm that works in other applications don't use cmr10 (the font encoding will not be understood) use the latin modern opentype font (you'll have a copy in your tex setup) – David Carlisle Dec 26 '16 at 19:49
@David. Looks awesome but no Cyrillic. – Daniel Dec 26 '16 at 19:56
@Daniel computer modern has no cyrillic either, oh perhaps you were using the cm unicode fonts Ok they are good alternative to latin modern – David Carlisle Dec 26 '16 at 19:58
OK thanks David. I am using LM, with Garamond for Cyrillic. Looks OK. Cyrillic S is not absolutely identical to Latin C, but close enough. – Daniel Dec 26 '16 at 20:09
\pounds just this works too – Academic May 29 '23 at 06:48

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Dec 26 '16 at 07:03

1

Use \pounds (natively supported in LaTeX) or \faGbp from fontawesome:

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{fontawesome}

\begin{document}

\pounds\ \verb|\pounds|

\faGbp\ \verb|\faGbp|

\end{document}

answered Dec 26 '16 at 07:03

Werner

603,163

How do you get a non-italic pound sign? (£)

2 Answers2