\pounds in verdana is not working

Question

This is the document:

\documentclass{article}
\renewcommand\familydefault{\sfdefault}
\renewcommand\sfdefault{phv}
\normalfont
\begin{document}
The jacket costs \pounds{}50.
\end{document}

I see a dollar sign in italic. Why? How to fix?

Answer 1

Well that's one of the reasons not to use OT1-encoding. As there is not enough space pound and dollar share a glyph position. In the cm-fonts the dollar is e.g. in the slshape variant and the pound in italic. With helvet (phv is not verdana) this can't work as there is no specific italic font.

To fix it, use \usepackage[T1]{fontenc}.

Answer 2

It's probably not a "good" fix, but a quick fix is to output the pounds symbol in a roman font instead:

\textrm{\pounds{}}50

gives the expected results (unless you're extremely picky about the font of the pounds symbol...)

Since you don't want to do this every time you need this symbol in the document, you probably want to store this in a macro:

\newcommand\rmpounds{\textrm{\pounds{}}

and then you use \rmpounds instead of \pounds everywhere.

(There's probably a nice way to hide this away in a package so you can use \pounds and get the same results as I do with \rmpounds, i.e. not forcing you to use a different command, but I can't figure out how to do it without getting capacity exceeded errors...)