13.1 \alph \Alph \arabic \roman \Roman \fnsymbol: Printing counters

Print the value of a counter, in a specified style. For instance, if the counter counter has the value 1 then a \alph{counter} in your source will result in a lowercase letter a appearing in the output.

All of these commands take a single counter as an argument, for instance, \alph{enumi}. Note that the counter name does not start with a backslash.

\alph{counter}

Print the value of counter in lowercase letters: ‘a’, ‘b’, ... If the counter’s value is less than 1 or more than 26 then you get ‘LaTeX Error: Counter too large.

\Alph{counter}

Print in uppercase letters: ‘A’, ‘B’, ... If the counter’s value is less than 1 or more than 26 then you get ‘LaTeX Error: Counter too large.

\arabic{counter}

Print in Arabic numbers such as ‘5’ or ‘-2’.

\roman{counter}

Print in lowercase roman numerals: ‘i’, ‘ii’, ... If the counter’s value is less than 1 then you get no warning or error but LaTeX does not print anything in the output.

\Roman{counter}

Print in uppercase roman numerals: ‘I’, ‘II’, ... If the counter’s value is less than 1 then you get no warning or error but LaTeX does not print anything in the output.

\fnsymbol{counter}

Prints the value of counter using a sequence of nine symbols that are traditionally used for labeling footnotes. The value of counter should be between 1 and 9, inclusive. If the counter’s value is less than 0 or more than 9 then you get ‘LaTeX Error: Counter too large’, while if it is 0 then you get no error or warning but LaTeX does not output anything.

Here are the symbols:

NumberNameCommandSymbol
1asterisk\ast*
2dagger\dagger
3ddagger\ddagger
4section-sign\S§
5paragraph-sign\P
6double-vert\parallel
7double-asterisk\ast\ast**
8double-dagger\dagger\dagger††
9double-ddagger\ddagger\ddagger‡‡

Unofficial LaTeX2e reference manual