I know in the written form, ampersands have a fair amount of variation beyond the standard &.
One I have seen and used frequently is what we will call the epsilon ampersand.
I was curious if there were any means of implementing this within LaTeX.
I have included a picture liberated from the ampersand Wikipedia entry.
Best Answer
Here's a solution inspired by Carla's suggestion to generate an epsilon ampersand for use in text mode. It should be compiled by XeLaTeX, using the Dejavu Sans font family.
Generating from Unicode characters
I combined the Unicode characters U+03B5, U+0375 and U+02B9. Not exactly the ones that Carla suggested in the comments, but I find these to work just fine as well.
Sample image:
Code
Comments:
\myamp{}
, which is necessary for proper spacing without resorting to usingxparse
package (see here) or hardcoding it into the macro definition. You could, if you want, if you're only ever going to use it as a standalone character.ex
's (1ex is the height of the letter x in the current font), which allows the symbol to scale according to the font size of the surrounding text.Generating in pdfLaTeX with \includegraphics
Another approach is by inserting a vector graphic, instead of generating it by yourself from unicode characters (saves all the work to optimize the heights/widths of the boxes etc.). I took the liberty to convert the
.png
file from Wikipedia Commons to an.svg
file using Inkscape.I then exported the
.svg
file into a.pdf
file to include directly in a macro I call\pdfamp
. You can find the.pdf
file which I created from.svg
here. The scaling of the graphic is done with the wonderfulscalerel
package, scaled to the size of an actual ampersand sign. This could probably use with some more tweaking, but this is the result:Sample image
Code
Comments:
.pdf
file of the epsilon ampersand converted from.svg
can be found here. If this ever gets taken down, you can attempt to convert the.png
from Wikipedia Commons to.svg
/.pdf
yourself using Inkscape -- it's fairly simple.\pdfamp{}
, for proper spacing in text mode.