Tech: How do Americans type a pound sign?

Subject: RE: Tech: How do Americans type a pound sign?
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 02 May 07 - 10:08 PM

My default font is (usually) Times New Roman, which uses a sloping line all the way through the "c". Some others use a complete vertical line (e.g. Tahoma), and some fonts use the broken line like you describe. For some (mostly old) faces, the line only extends above or below the outline of the c. It just depends on what mood the typographer was in when the typeface was named.

Unless there's a style sheet or coding that specifically calls for a particular typeface (font), in html you'll see most stuff in whatever default face you've told the browser to use.

For WinXP and Office programs of comparable era, it's possible to set up to have the fonts available in Office programs display "in font" so you can see at least the name of the one you select typed in the selection box roughly as it should appear in print.

You can also use the CharMap (see up above) to view how the characters will look in a different face.

John

Subject: RE: Tech: How do Americans type a pound sign?
From: Sorcha
Date: 02 May 07 - 10:31 PM

Guest, I don't recall anybody asking you. Log in or log off.

Subject: RE: Tech: How do Americans type a pound sign?
From: fumblefingers
Date: 02 May 07 - 10:46 PM

[ALT]0163 = £
[ALT]0128 = €

Subject: RE: Tech: How do Americans type a pound sign?
From: kendall
Date: 03 May 07 - 08:20 AM

Sorcha's suggestion works for me. I can now order my new Jaguar in English. Let's see, they run about, 60,000£. Or is it, £60,000?

Subject: RE: Tech: How do Americans type a pound sign?
From: Bill D
Date: 03 May 07 - 10:23 AM

A program for Windows which allows you to type weird characters with easy to remember keyboard combinations

AllChars

for example, for ¢, I just hit the ctrl. key to tell the program I want the next 2 characters to be combined, then c & / = ¢

Subject: RE: Tech: How do Americans type a pound sign?
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 03 May 07 - 01:23 PM

A program?

That's a built-in feature in Microsoft Office, and works in most Office programs (but not in IE).

If you hold down Ctl while you hit the first character, the second character overprints to make a "composite." It's not a general "overstrike" thing, since lots of Ctl-x key combinations are shortcuts that will "do something" instead of setting up the combination character. Ctl-c, as an example would "copy" something, but Ctl-/ c gets ¢.

In Word, the sequence Ctl-F9 eq \o(a,b,c) F9 Ctl-Shift-F9 will print a, b, and c all in the same character space, and is a general "any overstrike" capability. Ctl-F9 inserts a "Field," the eq specifies an "equation field," \o makes it an overstrike, any number of characters, separated by commas, can be entered in the parenthesese, F9 "evaluates" the field and Ctl-Shift-F9 unlinks it to make it a "printed" object. (Note that if more than a couple of characters are overprinted, usually one of them is about all that will show legibly.)

In recent Word versions, you can also type a Unicode HEX character number and then hit Alt-X and it will be converted to the character. This is less useful than it might be though, since the character has to be present as a glyph in the font you have set when you do it. The "characters" you get this way usually are like what you get with Office's "Insert Symbol" and if you change the font after the character is inserted it often changes to garbage (and can't be changed back). Windows default installations only include a couple of fonts with reasonably complete "European language" extended Unicode character glyphs (and I don't recall which ones they are at the moment). Several fonts have a few "random extra characters" that may work, but there's little consistency between common fonts.

John