Typesetting Sha and Bitcoin
I went down a rabbit hole this week using two symbols in LaTeX. The first was the Russian letter Sha (, U+0248), and the second was the currency symbol for Bitcoin (, U+20BF).
ShaI thought there would be a LaTeX package that would include as a symbol rather than as a Russian letter, just as \pi produces as a symbol rather than as a Greek letter per se, but apparently there isn't. I was surprised, since is used in math for at least three different things [1].
When I post on @TeXtip how to produce various symbols in LaTeX, I often get a reply telling me I should simply paste in the Unicode character and use XeTeX. That's what I ended up doing, except one does not simply use XeTeX.
You have to set the font to one that contains a glyph for the character you want, and you have to use a font encoding package. I ended up adding these two lines to my file header:
\usepackage[T2A]{fontenc} \usepackage{eulervm}That worked, but only when I compiled with pdflatex, not xelatex.
BitcoinI ended up using a different but analogous tactic for the Bitcoin symbol. I used fontspec, Liberation Sans, and xelatex rather than fontenc, Euler, and pdflatex. These were the lines I added to the header:
\usepackage{fontspec} \setmainfont{Liberation Sans}Without these two lines I get the error message
Missing character: There is no (U+20BF) in font ...
I didn't need to use and in the same document, but the approach in this section works for both. The approach in the previous section will not work for because the Euler font does not contain a gylph for .
Related posts[1] The three mathematical uses of that I'm aware of are the shuffle product, the Dirac comb distribution, and Tate-Shafarevich group.
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