🚀 go-pugleaf

Answering the question

  >is this a dollar or a pound sign $

Assuming that '$' is the character at position 2/4 (decimal 36), it should
be a dollar sign on all Ascii terminals.  If you wish to display a pound
sterling mark, and have selected the proper National Replacement Character
(NRC) set for your terminal, the character '#' at position 2/3 (decimal 35)
may be used.

Ansi terminals, such as the VT100 and VT200 series, use an escape sequence
to designate a character set in one of four "intermediate pointers", called
G0 through G3.  Several escape sequences may be used to designate G0 through
G3 into a selectable GL or GR set.

For example, if you want to display the United Kingdom NRC set, you may
load it into G0 by sending <ESC>(A and then select G0 in GL as the active
character set by sending SI (octal 17).

Among the character sets which display pound sign are
  Final
   R	French
   Y	Italian
   <	Dec Multinational
   Z	Spanish
   A	United Kingdom
(where Final is the final character of the escape sequence).

Note: if you edit the following line by replacing <ESC> by a real escape
(decimal 27) character, it should display a Pound-Sterling mark on terminals
that support the United Kingdom NRC:

   <ESC>+A<ESC>O#

The sequence is as follows:

   <ESC>+A		Select UK in G3
   <ESC>O		Single-shift 3 -- next char. comes from G3
   #			The character at position 2/3

I am aware that this is a fairly messy problem (I had to deal with
it for DECtalk) which, hopefully, will eventually start to go
away when the eight-bit ISO Latin 1 alphabet comes into wide use.

Martin Minow
decvax!minow