The European currency "Euro" is represented by a symbol of somewhat dubious design, but it's an important currency and (La)TeX users need to typeset it.
Note that the Commission of the European Community at first deemed that the Euro symbol should always be set in a sans-serif font; fortunately, this eccentric ruling has now been rescinded, and one may apply best typesetting efforts to making it appear at least slightly "respectable" (typographically).
The TS1-encoded fonts provided as part of the EC font
distribution provide Euro glyphs. The fonts are called Text Companion
(TC) fonts, and offer the same range
of faces as do the EC fonts themselves. The
textcomp package provides a \texteuro command for
accessing the symbol, which selects a symbol to match the surrounding
text. The design of the symbol in the TC fonts is not
universally loved...
Nevertheless, use the TC font version of the symbol if you are
producing documents using Knuth's Computer Modern Fonts.
The latin9 input encoding defined by the inputenc
package has a euro character defined (character position 164, occupied
in other ISO Latin character sets by the "currency symbol").
The encoding uses the command \texteuro for the character; at
present that command is only available from the
textcomp package. There is a MicroSoft code page position,
too, but standardisation of such things proceeds via rather different
routes and the LaTeX project hasn't yet been given details of the
change.
Outline fonts which contain nothing but Euro symbols are available
(free) from
Adobe -
the file is packaged as a Windows self-extracting
executable, but it may be decoded as a .zip format achive on other
operating systems.
The euro bundle contains metrics, dvips map
files, and macros (for Plain TeX and LaTeX), for using these
fonts in documents. LaTeX users will find two packages in the
bundle: eurosans only offers the sans-serif version (to
conform with the obsolete ruling about sans-serif-only symbols; the
package provides the
command \euro), whereas europs matches the Euro symbol
with the surrounding text (providing the command \EUR). To use
either package
with the latin9 encoding, you need to define \texteuro
as an alias for the euro command the package defines.
The Adobe fonts are probably the best bet for use in non-Computer Modern environments. They are apparently designed to fit with Adobe Times, Helvetica and Courier, but can probably fit with a wider range of modern fonts.
The eurofont package provides a compendious analysis of the "problem of the euro symbol" in its documentation, and offers macros for configuring the source of the glyphs to be used; however, it seems rather large for everyday use.
Euro symbols are found in several other places, which we list here for completeness.
The marvosym fonts contain a Euro symbol among many other good things; the font on CTAN is not Adobe ATM compatible, but a compatible version is available free from Y&Y. The font on CTAN comes with a set of macros to typeset all the symbols it contains.
Other Metafont-based bundles containing Euro symbols are to be found in china2e (whose primary aim is Chinese dates and suchlike matters) and the eurosym fonts.