Typesetting zodiac symbols in LaTeX
The Endeavour 2019-09-20
Typesetting zodiac symbols in LaTeX is admittedly an unusual thing to do. LaTeX is mostly used for scientific publication, and zodiac symbols are commonly associated with astrology. But occasionally zodiac symbols are used in more respectable contexts.
The wasysym package for LaTeX includes miscellaneous symbols, including zodiac symbols. Here are the symbols, their LaTeX commands, and their corresponding Unicode code points.
The only surprise here is that the command for Capricorn is based on the Latin form of the name: \capricornus.
Each zodiac sign is used to denote a 30° region of the sky. Since the Unicode symbols are consecutive, you can compute the code point of a symbol from the longitude angle θ in degrees:
Here 9800 is the decimal form of 0x2648, and the half brackets are the floor symbol, i.e. round down to the nearest integer.
Here’s the LaTeX code that produced the table.
\documentclass{article}\usepackage{wasysym}\begin{document}\begin{table}\begin{tabular}{lll}\aries & \verb|\aries | & U+2648 \\\taurus & \verb|\taurus | & U+2649 \\\gemini & \verb|\gemini | & U+264A \\\cancer & \verb|\cancer | & U+264B \\\leo & \verb|\leo | & U+264C \\\virgo & \verb|\virgo | & U+264D \\\libra & \verb|\libra | & U+264E \\\scorpio & \verb|\scorpio | & U+264F \\\sagittarius & \verb|\sagittarius | & U+2650 \\\capricornus & \verb|\capricornus | & U+2651 \\\aquarius & \verb|\aquarius | & U+2652 \\\pisces & \verb|\pisces | & U+2653 \\\end{tabular}\end{table}\end{document}By the way, you can use the Unicode values in HTML by replacing U+ with &#x and adding a semicolon on the end.