Want to show the percentage symbol using Helvetica rather than using the default text font

Question

The following code produces a strange rendered percentage symbol which looks like this:
Here's my code:

\documentclass[12pt, a4paper, twoside, %openright, 
toc=listof, BCOR=5mm, bibliography=totoc, parskip=half]{scrreprt}
\usepackage{helvet}
\usepackage[ngerman]{babel} 
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc} 
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\begin{document}
11-13\%
\end{document}

Now I used the board search and came across this solution: Combining Helvetica and Symbol fonts with mathspec But since I'm not too familiar with all these LaTeX packages and I'm not using them, I didn't want to just add them to my code, but wanted to know, which lines i need to add to get my code working without possibly changing anything else which i might not want. Thanks in advance

Answer 1

If you really want the matching % from the original font, but without the "little bow" (as I interpret your comment to Mico), then one option is to define a new \% that paints over the offending "bow". Here, I have made it work for different text size changes.

In the MWE, I define \overlayclr so that you can see what I am painting over (when I set it to red). I show the original \% at the far right, so you can see that the size of the revised glyph matches the original.

\documentclass[12pt, a4paper, twoside, %openright, 
toc=listof, BCOR=5mm, bibliography=totoc, parskip=half]{scrreprt}
\usepackage{helvet}
\usepackage[ngerman]{babel} 
%\usepackage[T1]{fontenc} 
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage{graphicx,xcolor,stackengine,scalerel}
\let\svpct\%
\def\overlayclr{white}
\renewcommand{\%}{\scalerel*{\stackon[0pt]{\stackon[0pt]{\normalsize\svpct}{\smash{%
  \textcolor{\overlayclr}{\rotatebox{56.8}{\rule[-4.55pt]{2.5pt}{1.5pt}}}}}}%
  {\smash{\textcolor{\overlayclr}{%
  \rotatebox{27}{\kern-.84pt\rule[-2.5pt]{1.5pt}{2.5pt}}}}}}{\svpct}}
\begin{document}
\Huge11-13\%\quad{\def\overlayclr{red}11-13\%\svpct}\par
\normalsize11-13\%\quad{\def\overlayclr{red}11-13\%\svpct}
\end{document}

Answer 2

You can get the percent sign in whatever family you want by using

\DeclareRobustCommand{\%}{{%
  \mbox{%
    \fontencoding{\encodingdefault}%
    \fontfamily{<family>}%
    \selectfont
    \symbol{`\%}%
  }%
}}

and the only problem is to choose the right <family> name. For Helvetica it would be phv, but the percent symbol would stick out like a sore thumb in a serif font context.

The little bow is customary for serif fonts; among the free ones I can see the Kpfonts and Bookman without it, but the symbol would be again in a non compatible style with the default fonts.

Here's a possible choice for <family>:

If you plan to use \% in math mode, change \mbox into \text (and load amsmath).

And now that you can appreciate the differences in style, stick with the default.

Answer 3

If you want to render the default percent symbol in Helvetica, without changing any other aspect of the text font, you could proceed by inserting the following instructions in the preamble:

\usepackage{helvet}   % select Helvetica as the sans-serif font
\let\origpercent\%    % save the "original" "\%" macro
\renewcommand{\%}{\textsf{\origpercent}}