Calligraphic symbols in LaTeX

If you’re unhappy with the way the standard amsmath/amssymb packages display a caligraphic L, and you want a more curly/loopy L for your Lagrangian density, then here’s a way out.

1. Install the package texlive-calrsfs. I had to run “yum install texlive-calrsfs” as superuser to accomplish this on Fedora 20.

2. Declare the following headers above your document

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{calrsfs}
\DeclareMathAlphabet{\pazocal}{OMS}{zplm}{m}{n}
\newcommand{\La}{\mathcal{L}}
\newcommand{\Lb}{\pazocal{L}}

 

3. The more loopy version of L is now mapped to \La, whereas the conventional version is \Lb.

Hope this helps!

Adapted from: http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/69085/two-different-calligraphic-font-styles-in-math-mode