Talk:Pound sign

message: what is the deal with pound signs having double crosses or not?
anyone know why we use single cross these days..something to do with keyboards?
: I don't think it's significant, just a stylistic difference like using a different font. For what it's worth I hand-write pound signs with two cross-bars (I'm 24 if we think date might have something to do with it). PeteVerdon 10:17, 21 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: This has been corrected. The Bank of England used the double-crossed variant from 1919 to 1963, it is now totally obsolete. See Pound sign#Double dash style. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 23:54, 26 September 2019 (UTC)
thread_title: £ or ₤

message: "The symbol "£" has a value 156 in Extended ASCII."
Please specify which variant of "extended ASCII" this refers to (Latin-1 or whatever). (Stefan2 21:50, 17 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I believe it was 156 in the original IBM codepage used in DOS. The value is 163 in modern codepages. --Rdiggle 11:12, 30 August 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Why not this fact include in the article? Henrilebec (talk) 08:41, 11 February 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: Because the article is about the pound sign, not about the history of character encoding? Nevertheless, I have inserted parenthesised notes  in the relevant sentence of Pound sign#Code points  so that it now reads "The encoding of the £ symbol in position xA3  was first standardised by ISO Latin-1  in 1985. "  --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 11:36, 11 February 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Extended ASCII 

message: this page displays incorrectly in IE7.  - the right box floats over text. can someone fix it?
:I'm sorry, but only the Microsoft team can deal with problems arising from IE7's messed up standards 'support'. 81.108.97.33 01:42, 15 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Incorrect Display 

message: The article states that the original basis of the pound Sterling is one Troy pound of silver. This seems very unlikely in terms of historical sequence (the English pound is mentioned centuries before any the Troy pound was established as a standard) and geographical origin. According to Adam Smith in 'The Wealth of Nations' the English penny was 1/240 of the "pound Tower weight". The pound Tower weight was 326 grams as contrasted with the Troy pound of 373 grams, so there is a discrepancy of over 14%. I have altered the article accordingly.
Agemegos 23:58, 25 June 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Troy pound? Tower pound! 

message: According to the article on sterling silver, sterling silver is first known in the 13th century. But the English pound as a unit of currency is attested from Saxon times. It therefore seems unlikely that sterling can be the original standard of fineness for the pound. Smith says (in 'The Wealth of Nations' that the original standard was one pound (Tower weight) of fine silver. I have altered the article accordingly.
Agemegos 00:06, 26 June 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Sterling silver 

message: I think the text should say that today the sign is usually written before the amount. I get the impression from old books and articles I have seen that in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it was more common to write the sign after the amount. Shulgi 20:54, 27 July 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Sounds right. Back when they just wrote a cursive lower-case l., that went after the amount just like shillings. But  cites for the upper-case version? — LlywelynII 23:12, 25 February 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Before or After the Amount (Number) 

message: Aren't they the same thing? $ redirects to dollar sign. And as far as I can tell, £ and £ (disambiguation) both redirects to £ (currency). So there isn't any other £. (by the way, to make things worse, Talk:£ (disambiguation) redirects like main space to Talk:£ (currency), but Talk:£ redirects to Talk:Pound sign!). --ChoChoPK (球球PK) (talk | contrib) 17:48, 15 September 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Makes sense to me --Rumping 11:47, 19 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Merge with [[£ (currency)]] 

message: Hmm?--82.152.216.199 (talk) 22:51, 18 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: WP:NOT#HOWTO. EdC (talk) 23:34, 18 November 2007 (UTC)

text: I think one line hardly makes it a "how-to style manual of instructions". --82.152.216.199 (talk) 00:04, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

text: And here are some other articles SpySheriff#Removal, Inverted question mark and exclamation point, List of HD Enhanced PS2 games, Umlaut (diacritic)#Computer_usage. Next you'll be saying Carbon offset is a HOWTO for governments. Also, this page says how to enter the character in HTML- how is that any different?? --82.152.216.199 (talk) 00:13, 19 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes; it describes its entity reference forms, which are standardised and factual.  Also, I tried your supposed entry method and it didn't work.  EdC (talk) 23:54, 19 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: It's not my method. Anyway, as you can see from the other articles, it is the done thing to post how to type some characters, so please stop removing information, thanks.--82.152.216.199 (talk) 13:04, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

text: BTW did you actually type the 0? If you do alt and 163 it won't work. it has to be alt + 0163--82.152.216.199 (talk) 13:06, 21 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes; nothing happened.  Perhaps you should mention what operating system you're using.  EdC (talk) 01:03, 24 November 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Why not say how to type it? 

message: I removed "on Earth's surface" from the metric equivalence.  The kilogram is a unit of mass, not force, so the comparison is valid anywhere.  Rojomoke (talk) 13:28, 13 April 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Pound kg comparison 

message: :"The symbol "₤" is also known as the lira sign. In Italy, prior to the adoption of the euro, the symbol was used as an alternative to the more usual L to indicate prices in lire."
This paragraph in the lead section seems to be emphasising that the symbol with the double bar was used for lira. This contradicts the Unicode document  referred to later in the article, which says that the double bar character was not widely used, and the single bar character was preferred. 86.176.211.86 (talk) 20:45, 5 September 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: The lira sign in Italy was very frequently written with two dashes, especially in handwriting, despite what that Unicode page may say. You can have a look yourself at what appeared on a standard Italian typewriter of the day: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_8pq4w7Eq5-Q/TO1-tvtInwI/AAAAAAAABhs/z37dcQej-qs/s1600/IMG_0464.JPG 128.179.67.43 (talk) 16:47, 30 November 2011 (UTC)

text: Unicode doesn't say that the double-bar character was not widely used; it says that U+20A4 is not widely used, as U+00A3 is preferred. The chart shows U+20A4 with two bars, and U+00A3 with only one, but this isn't a specification of how the characters must look. See the relevant section of the Unicode Standard (in Unicode 6.1 it's section 15.1). --Zundark (talk) 13:30, 4 August 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Lira sign 

message: I constantly struggle with inputting this sign in Japanese Windows (which defaults to a US keyboard layout for Roman letter input). Depending on the application, codepage, language settings, IME, typeface/glyphs and similar unquantifiable things, many of the methods suggested work in some situations but not others (e.g. + often gives ｣, i.e. U+FF63, HALFWIDTH RIGHT CORNER BRACKET - note that 163 is the codepoint for this symbol in Shift JIS). However, although + works (sometimes), I can't figure out why it works at all. Is it 6556 decimal or 6556 hex, or some other representation?
Trying Unicode first...
In decimal (6556), i.e. 0x199C in hex, this is ᦜ (U+199C, NEW TAI LUE LETTER HIGH LA). In hexadecimal (0x6556), i.e. 25942 in decimal, it is 敖 (U+6556, CJK UNIFIED IDEOGRAPH-6556).
For comparison:
+ gives Ü (U+00DC, LATIN CAPITAL LETTER U WITH DIAERESIS, decimal 220)
+ gives ø (U+00F8, LATIN SMALL LETTER O WITH STROKE, decimal 248)
+ gives £ (U+00A3, POUND SIGN, decimal 163)
+ gives Ø (U+00D8, LATIN CAPITAL LETTER O WITH STROKE decimal 216)
+ gives × (U+00D7, MULTIPLICATION SIGN, decimal 215)
... from which I conclude that it's nothing to do with Unicode. Instead, these characters appear in this order in codepage 850: Ü=154 ø=155 £=156 Ø=157 ×=158
Simple maths: 6556-156 = 6400 (0x1900), or 0x6556-156= 25786 (0x64BA). The latter seems rather random, so let's assume it's decimal. So the + code and similar appear to be "Code Page 850 plus 6400". But why?!
Ozaru (talk) 10:23, 26 October 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: Because the implementation does mod-256 with whatever number was typed (or equivalently does binary mask with 255) before turning it into a character!Spitzak (talk) 20:01, 6 November 2019 (UTC)

text: Developing? 1661?? (See Pound sign#Origins). But to aid future readers, I have added a note to show what the letter L looked like in the blackletter font used at the time. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 16:28, 7 November 2019 (UTC)

text: But if you type Alt+0163, "just use Unicode" is exactly what you are doing: the leading zero tells Windows "treat this as a Unicode alt code, not a code page alt code". Have you tried Alt+0163 without switching layouts? (When you wrote above that you get HALFWIDTH RIGHT CORNER BRACKET, are you sure you remembered the leading zero because it would make more sense if did not.- --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 08:28, 10 September 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: Just to confirm: Alt+0163 (with the 0) produces the following results with the various keyboard layouts: Japanese keyboard ｣ Microsoft IME ｣ Microsoft Pinyin ｣ Thai Kedmanee ฃ US/UK £. QED. Ozaru (talk) 09:46, 11 September 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Explanation for Alt keycode 6556? 

message: An anon editor deleted the statement in the lead that the # (ENUS:pound sign) means weight. I have seen grocery stores with produce priced at 50¢/# but I can't find any citation to support it. The same claim is made at pound (mass) but is also uncited. Can anyone oblige? --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 23:50, 26 September 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  # in US to mean pound weight 

message: The following page has an image of a cheque dated December 1660 (I can't work out the day) with a recognisable pound sign visible: https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/museum/online-collections/banknotes/early-banknotes. This Wikipedia article quotes the Royal Mint Museum as saying the Bank of England Museum has a cheque dated 7 January 1661 with a clearly discernible £ sign. This is indeed what the Royal Mint Museum link says, and perhaps there is a second cheque dated 7 January 1661. However, it seems preferable to quote the Bank of England Museum and use the image from that page. I assume that since the author of the cheque died over 100 years ago that the image is not copyrighted. Danielklein (talk) 11:31, 2 December 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: Good find! The BoE caption says 8 December (which is what I see in the image as well). Are you suggesting that we 'acquire' the image itself? (as it is out of copyright and [at least in US law] a photograph of a document that is out of copyright does not itself have a new copyright), or just update the article with the more reliable source? I would certainly agree that we should do the latter for now and since you found it, you should have the honour of doing the update. I think we shall have to wp:AGF for the Mint and suspend disbelief that the BoE really does another cheque dated 7 Jan 1661 that they've not bothered to put on their website. Meanwhile I'll ask a question at the Commons helpdesk about liberating the BoE image. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 12:05, 2 December 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Early cheque displaying the pound symbol