Cifrão[p] is the symbol of the former Portuguese currency (Escudo ISO 4217 PTE), Cape Verdean escudo and Portuguese Timor escudo, that was in use until 1976 (TPE).[1] It is still used in Brazil for the Brazilian Real. Its symbol is similar to the dollar sign ("$"), but it is always written with two vertical lines, 
. In the Unicode-standard, there is no difference between these two symbols, i.e. in a particular fontset, a symbol with one or two lines can be used. It is placed as a decimal point between escudo and centavos, e.g. 
(as on the coin on the illustration right nearby).
On Mac OS X the following fonts, supplied with the system, contain cifrão signs rather than the single-stroke dollar symbol:
- Baskerville (only the regular weight, not bold or semibold)
- Big Caslon, Bodoni MT, Brush Script MT
- Garamond, STFangsong, STKaiti and STSong.
Support for the symbol on other platforms varies.
In LaTeX, the cifrão symbol () can be input using the command \textdollaroldstyle. The textcomp package must be installed.
References
[p] - The word "cifrão" is pronounced as "see-fruhn-oh".
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