What does this argument to the \symbol command mean

Question

I was looking at this page here and came across this line which I don't understand.

\symbol{"E052}

Can you explain to me what the significance of E052 is, and how I could modify this command to give me different symbols.

Thanks

Answer 1

It means the number of the glyph in the font encoding. By default, OT1 encoding. In XeTeX, EU1 encoding is used, i.e. Unicode.

"E502 is hexadecimal number 58626 in TeX. You can use \symbol{"E502} or \symbol{58626} or \symbol{'162402}(octal number) for this symbol. It is in private range of Unicode. See http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Unicode/Character_reference/E000-EFFF