On 09/03/2015 05:44 AM, Fritz Wuehler wrote:
>>> Might be too early to say \textsterling obsoletes \pounds.
>>> Bizarre things happen when the datatool package encounters
>>> \textsterling.
>>
>> Actually, far better to use UTF-8 and XeLaTeX and just type £
>
> I'm not familiar with XeLaTeX, and apparently I don't have it as part
> of the texlive package.
That sounds wrong. As far as I know it has been included in TeX Live for
some years now. What version are you using?
> So I tried using "£"
That came through here as two separate bytes, probably due to an
underlying Usenet transport encoding, or to Frell's anonymiser.
> with the following two
> includes, then fed to pdflatex:
>
> \usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
> \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
I use utf8x not utf8.
> It does not even compile when that symbol occurs in a CSV file that is
> read by the datatool package:
>
> ! FP error: Illegal character � found in float number!.
> \***@errmessage #1->\errmessage {FP error: #1!}
This looks like an encoding problem. If you're going to use UTF-8, *all*
your files *must* be in UTF-8 -- you cannot have some in UTF-8 and
others in different encodings (eg ISO 8859-1, ISO 8859-15, Windows-1252,
Mac Roman 8, Big5, DEC Multinational, or anything else [ASCII is OK]).
> Also, according to Paulo Cereda(*) the "£" renders as a dollar sign
> ("$") in some cases if it's not italicised. Seems strange, but
> probably a good enough reason to avoid it.
Not if you read the rest of the post you cited: his problem was caused
by a bogus font encoding.
> So \pounds seems to be the most reliable and predictable construct.
Whatever works for you.
///Peter