symbols
In mathematical writing I often use \ell when I need an 'ell' variable, because l looks like a 1. In fact, I expect this is why the symbol exists :).
Now, it often happens that my \ell stands for (l)eft, and I would like to have a symbol for an 'r' variable that stands for (r)ight.
Is there a simple way to make a cursive looking r?
there's a "canned" routine called testfont. use it with plain tex:
tex testfont
it will walk you through what it wants to test. the first question is what font you want.
the comprehensive symbols list should show you what fonts the asterisk is in (i'm pretty
sure there's one in cmsy10). then you tell it what to do. the usual directive is
\table\bye
if you want to test another font, then respond \table\vfill\eject\init and the "what font"
question will come up again. you can preview the result, or print it out for reference.
the indices on the top/bottom/sides of the table will identify the addresses of the cells,
which is what the last argument of \DeclareMathSymbol wants.
You could, of course, use TikZ for this:
The symbol will scale with your font size, since it uses ex to define the path.
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{tikz}
\begin{document}
\newcommand\shield{%
\tikz [baseline] \draw (0,1.75ex) -- (0,0.75ex) arc [radius=0.75ex, start angle=-180, end angle=0] -- (1.5ex,1.75ex) -- cycle;%
}
A shield: \shield
\end{document}
If you're feeling fancy, you could parametrise it a bit:
\documentclass[border=3mm]{standalone}
\usepackage{tikz}
\begin{document}
\newcommand\shield[1][]{%
\tikzset{
shield width/.store in=\shieldwidth,
shield width=1.5ex,
shield height/.store in=\shieldheight,
shield height=1.75ex
}%
\tikz [baseline,#1] \draw (0,\shieldheight) -- (0,\shieldwidth/2) arc [radius=\shieldwidth/2, start angle=-180, end angle=0] -- (\shieldwidth,\shieldheight) -- cycle;%
}
A shield: \shield
A wide shield: \shield[shield width=2ex]
A tall shield: \shield[shield height=3ex]
\end{document}
Best Answer
The "Mathematical Script Small R" is just a Unicode character, so if you can enter it in your editor, and you have a font that includes a suitable representation, then it's as simple as this:
I'm using MacVim and xelatex with TexLive 2013 here and I get this
On the Mac you can get the symbol from the character viewer. This is the information it gives about it.
And if entering the character from the viewer is too laborious you can always define a little macro for it:
(This feels vaguely like something for http://www.talklikeapirate.com/)