U.S. dollar and other local currency, such as the former Portuguese escudo. However, such usage is not standardized, and furthermore the two versions are generally considered mere graphic variants of the same symbol—a typeface design choice. Computer and typewriter keyboards usually have a single key for that sign, and many character encodings (including ASCII and Unicode) reserve a single numeric code for it. Indeed, dollar signs in the same digital document may be rendered with one or two strokes, if different computer fonts are used. Should that ambiguity be significant, one may use explicit abbreviations (like "" or "$NZ"), or ISO 4217 three-letter currency codes (such as USD and MXN) to distinguish different currencies that use the symbol. When a specific variant is not mandated by law or custom, the choice is usually a matter of expediency or aesthetic preference. Both versions were used in the US in the 18th century. (An 1861 Civil War-era advertisement depicts the two-stroked symbol as a snake.) The two-stroke version seems to be generally less popular today, though used in some "old-style" fonts like Baskerville. Use in computer software Because of its use in early American computer applications such as business accounting, the dollar sign is almost universally present in computer character sets, and thus has been appropriated for many purposes unrelated to money in programming languages and command languages. Encoding The dollar sign "$" has Unicode code point U+0024 (inherited from ASCII via Latin-1). There are no separate encodings for one- and two-line variants. The choice is typeface-dependent, they are allographs. However, there are three other code points that originate from other East Asian standards: the Taiwanese small form variant, the CJK fullwidth form, and the Japanese emoji. The glyphs for these code points are typically larger or smaller than the primary code point, but the difference is mostly aesthetic or typographic, and the meanings of the symbols are the same. However, for usage as the special character in various computing applications (see following sections), U+0024 is typically the only code that is recognized. Support for the two-line variant varies. the Unicode standard considers the distinction between one- and two-bar dollar signs a stylistic distinction between fonts, and has no separate code point for the . The symbol is not in the October 2019 'pipeline', but appears to be under active consideration. The following fonts display a double-bar dollar sign for code point