🚀 go-pugleaf

In article "don't you just love these Pine Article-Ids?" <Pine.LNX.
3.95.961227161755.13877C-100000@avarice.nepean.uws.edu.au>,
David J N Begley  <d.begley@nepean.uws.edu.au> wrote:
>On 26 Dec 1996, Patrick TJ McPhee wrote (seriously pruned):
>
>> No quote, but still italic, and it's still a pound sign.
>
>As I've since discovered, thanks.  A small document that illustrates this:
>
>> The currency in cm italic is a pound sign.
>
>Even though I was using the "times" PostScript font, not the Computer
>Modern font?  (Again, excuse my ignorance if in this context they're one
>and the same...)

It's not the font so much as the way that font is encoded.  Other
things being equal, psnfss will simply mimic OT1, which is Knuth's
(eccentric) encoding.

>It just seems so strange that by removing the "\usepackage{times}" line
>the problem disappears - yet all "times" does is redefine which font is
>sans serif, roman and teletype.  I though maybe the italicised version of
>the "times" PS font didn't support the dollar sign, yet if you look at
>TeX's output, the character "\243" (or something) appears where the dollar
>sign should be in the italicised text, and "$" (ie., correct) appears
>elsewhere.  By viewing with "xdvi", the problem still exists (and my
>"xdvi" can't see/use PS fonts), so it's as though TeX is making the change
>itself.

LaTeX (at least the current release) devolves \$ (in text) to a
curious command \OT1\textdollar (yes, that's just one command ;-)
which detects whether the current font is upright, and if not uses
\slshape.  Which implements:

>> If you need to put a dollar sign in italic text, Knuth suggests using
>> the slanted dollar sign.

Yet another way in which current LaTeX is better than 2.09...

Anyway, this doesn't change if you use Times; I just checked both
under the latest release and 1994/12/01 (the oldest I have easy access
to).

>More information, please.  :-)

I'm flummoxed.  Let on which version you're using, do...
--
Robin (Campaign for Real Radio 3) Fairbairns     rf@cl.cam.ac.uk
U of Cambridge Computer Lab, Pembroke St, Cambridge  CB2 3QG, UK
Home page: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/rf/robin.html