Can somebody explain font numbers to me?

[shoresigns]

Wow, I've been doing a terrible job of explaining myself today. All the "rules" I've referenced in regards to how the dollar sign is supposed to look are in regards to standard serif and sans-serif fonts. Of course you can render the dollar sign however you want when you're using display fonts (i.e. brush, handwritten, and other artistic fonts that wouldn't be used in a paragraph of text).

Pat, I believe the cent sign isn't capitalized because cents are a diminutive form of dollars, so the symbol for cents became a diminutive (i.e. lowercase) "c", but with a line through it to draw a connection with the dollar symbol.

 

[ddarlak]

but not reduced and centred vertically like in Pat's original example

I disagree, I've been doing it like pat suggested for 25 years