Cifrão
Encyclopedia
Currency sign
A currency sign is a graphic symbol used as a shorthand for a currency's name, especially in reference to amounts of money. They typically employ the first letter or character of the currency, sometimes with minor changes such as ligatures or overlaid vertical or horizontal bars...
similar to the dollar sign
Dollar sign
The dollar or peso sign is a symbol primarily used to indicate the various peso and dollar units of currency around the world.- Origin :...
($) but always written with two vertical lines:
. It is the official sign of the Cape Verdean escudo (ISO 4217ISO 4217
ISO 4217 is a standard published by the International Standards Organization, which delineates currency designators, country codes , and references to minor units in three tables:* Table A.1 – Current currency & funds code list...
: CVE
CVE
CVE may stand for:*Cabo Verde Express, Cape Verde, ICAO airline designator*Canadian Venture Exchange, the Canadian stock exchange for small capitalization companies*Cape Verdean escudo, the ISO 4217 code for the currency of Cape Verde...
) and a common unofficial sign of the Brazilian real
Brazilian real
The real is the present-day currency of Brazil. Its sign is R$ and its ISO code is BRL. It is subdivided into 100 centavos ....
(sign
Currency sign
A currency sign is a graphic symbol used as a shorthand for a currency's name, especially in reference to amounts of money. They typically employ the first letter or character of the currency, sometimes with minor changes such as ligatures or overlaid vertical or horizontal bars...
: R$; ISO: BRL).
It was formerly used by the Portuguese escudo
Portuguese escudo
The escudo was the currency of Portugal prior to the introduction of the Euro on 1 January 1999 and its removal from circulation on 28 February 2002. The escudo was subdivided into 100 centavos....
(ISO: PTE
PTE
PTE may refer to:*CVH-PTE Engine, an engine produced by the Ford Motor Company*Partido de los Trabajadores de Ecuador, the Workers' Party of Ecuador*Partido del Trabajo de España, the Party of Labour of Spain...
) before its replacement by the euro
Euro
The euro is the official currency of the eurozone: 17 of the 27 member states of the European Union. It is also the currency used by the Institutions of the European Union. The eurozone consists of Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg,...
and by the Portuguese Timor escudo (ISO: TPE
TPE
-Transportation:*Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport , an airport serving Taipei, Republic of China *Tampines Expressway, a major highway in Singapore*TransPennine Express, a train operating company in the United Kingdom-Science:...
) before its replacement by the Indonesian rupiah
Indonesian rupiah
The rupiah is the official currency of Indonesia. Issued and controlled by the Bank of Indonesia, the ISO 4217 currency code for the Indonesian rupiah is IDR. Informally, Indonesians also use the word "perak" in referring to rupiah...
and the US dollar.
In Portuguese and Cape Verdean usage, the cifrão is placed as a decimal point between the escudo and centavo
Centavo
Centavo is a Spanish and Portuguese word, derived from the Latin centum, meaning "one hundred", and the suffix -avo, meaning "portion" or "fraction"...
values (e.g.,
).Character support
Support for the symbol varies. The UnicodeUnicode
Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...
standard currently (2010) considers the distinction between one- and two-bar dollar signs a stylistic distinction between fonts and has no separate value for the cifrão. The Mac OS X
Mac OS X
Mac OS X is a series of Unix-based operating systems and graphical user interfaces developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Inc. Since 2002, has been included with all new Macintosh computer systems...
supplies the following fonts containing distinct cifrão signs: regular-weight Baskerville
Baskerville
Baskerville is a transitional serif typeface designed in 1757 by John Baskerville in Birmingham, England. Baskerville is classified as a transitional typeface, positioned between the old style typefaces of William Caslon, and the modern styles of Giambattista Bodoni and Firmin Didot.The...
, Big Caslon, Bodoni MT, Brush Script MT, Garamond
Garamond
Garamond is the name given to a group of old-style serif typefaces named after the punch-cutter Claude Garamond . Most of the Garamond faces are more closely related to the work of a later punch-cutter, Jean Jannon...
, STFangsong, STKaiti, and STSong. In LaTeX
LaTeX
LaTeX is a document markup language and document preparation system for the TeX typesetting program. Within the typesetting system, its name is styled as . The term LaTeX refers only to the language in which documents are written, not to the editor used to write those documents. In order to...
, with the textcomp package installed, the cifrão (
) can be input using the command \textdollaroldstyle.Because of the current difficulty supporting the character, $ is frequently employed in its place even for official purposes.