Slashdot Mirror
India's New Rupee Symbol Won't Show On Computers
itwbennett writes "It will take at least 18 months for encoding in Unicode the symbol for the Indian rupee that was approved by the Indian cabinet on Thursday. But it may be over two years before the rupee symbol starts showing on computers and mobile phones, analysts said. Many vendors are also undecided whether they will offer the new symbol on keyboards and keypads, or as additions in software to the character set supported by their devices. Nokia, for example, welcomed the move by the Indian government to have a symbol for the rupee. But a company spokeswoman said it's too early to comment on how the symbol will be implemented, whether on the phone keypad or on the character list."
Back in the good old days, we had ascii 004- which gave us a nice little diamond symbol. What happened to that?
If I had my way, real life symbols would resemble the symbols in games- like gem shapes.
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
How long did it take the Euro sign to get easily usable by computers? I think much longer than they predict for the rupee sign. These things take time, but a short time in comparison with the lifetime of the symbols in European and Indian society, so don't worry about it too much.
-- Cheers!
... to get a symbol for its currency. Congratulations!
What's wrong with letters?
1500 rupees - 1500R.
It works fine for Swiss Francs - Ch. F.
The euro symbol was a stupid idea.
... and it's for a good reason. That said, this kind of thing should have been coordinated *beforehand*, to avoid exactly this situation. The long lag between introducing the new symbol and actually being able to use it might kill it.
OTOH, the Unicode consortium approved several years ago the symbol for the Argentinian austral (""), a currency that ended up dying an inglorious (yet entirely deserved) death a few months afterwards.
"Trust me - I know what I'm doing."
- Sledge Hammer
Its nice to see that they have used a devanagari character (0930 ) as the basis for this.
Is fine Benny Lava! Minor bun engine made Benny Lava! Anybody need this symbol Benny Lava?
Just give the job to the counterfeiters, they'll have it out in a couple of months.
Why is it taking so long to adopt - it can't be that difficult to adapt to new symbols?
After all, Slashdot managed to adopt Unicode after only - oh, wait.....
Hmmm....
They could just use the $ until then. We will know the difference.
If there isn't, why is character 20A8 called "Rupee Sign" then?
I admit that the first time I saw the Rupee symbol on the iPhone I thought I was looking at the symbol for the Yen. I wonder if the designers take into consideration that the symbols, when scaled way down, start to all look the same. Maybe that's the point?
Not specifically thinking about the Rupee, I would imagine that, in this day and age, a designer would know that the symbol/icon/logo/whatever needs to be recognizable at a potentially very small size.
"Nokia, for example, welcomed the move by the Indian government to have a symbol for the rupee.". Not surprising since a huge portion of Nokia's hardware and software development is now done in Hyderabad, India.
Don't go changing it yet. The Russians may want something too similar to it like a capitol R with two lines through the top. But, since the Russians and the Indians are close allies the Russians may let them have it.
Legend of Zelda games have had the same rupee symbol for years!
If you utilize the left-hand side of an imaginary rectangle enclosing the symbol, the symbol contains all of the letters in the word RUPEE.
How many more years will slashdot have an off-by-one error on your Score in your profile?
* Use U+20A8 RUPEE SIGN. It looks different, but means exactly the same: Indian rupees. Just replace the glyph in new fonts.
* Fake it. Use U+0930 DEVANAGARI LETTER RA, from which the rupee symbol is derived, plus a combining bar, e.g. U+0304, U+0334, U+0335 -- whatever looks best.
The proposal for the Rupee symbol has already been written and submitted to the document register for the Unicode Technical Committee. The next Unicode meeting will be at Microsoft next month, and the Rupee symbol will be approved there. The WG2 - the ISO 10646 body - is in October in Pusan, South Korea, again with astronomical approval prospects. I think it is likely that Unicode will publish a minor edition (6.0.5) right after Pusan - like they did with the Euro - in order to include the new Rupee as soon as possible. Realistically, this is as little as three months from being in Unicode. And the problems with the Euro were in 8859, not Unicode. In fact, there are still brain-dead auto-detect algorithms where texts in 8859-15 (with Euro) are interpreted as 8859-1 (without Euro).
This is not the 5th currency symbol encoded. Unicode 6.0 includes dollar, cent, pound, yen, florin/guilder, afghani; bengali, gujarati, tamil, and Rs Rupee signs; Thai Bhat, khmer riel, rial, ECU, Colon, Cruzeiro, French Franc, Lira, mill, Nigerian Naira, peseta, won, new shequel, Vietnamese Dong, Euro, Kip (Laos), Mongolian Tugrik, Drachma, Pfenning, Philipine Peso, Guarani, old Argentinian Austral, Ukrainian Hryvnia, Ghanain Cedi, old French Livre Tournois, Esperantist Spesmilo, and the Kazakh Tenge. That's a good couple dozen countries with a currency symbol already encoded, along with a few historic and partial currency symbols.
Governments do things all of the time that make systems hard to implement. Adding a new currency doesn't seem terribly cumbersome in comparison to other government requirements.
For example, apparently Thailand just passed a Thai Computer Crimes Act that requires IT providers to track who has viewed people blogs just in case some blogger has said something critical of the Thai government. So, if your company has people in Thailand (we do), and they can potentially post information on a blog, you've got some work to do.
I'm so proud to be Indian today!!
:)
Because my currency will show up on computers and mobile devices in 2 years.
Robin: The Riddler has escaped of Gotham! He left a note!
Note: 'Riddle me this, Batman - solve this equation: "?==$"'
Batman: Hmmm... It looks like he's gotten into the Indian money market.
Robin: However did you guess that, Batman?
Batman: You just have to overlap the ... what am I explaining this to you for? When we get to India, I am totally replacing you with a cheaper Indian model.
Robin: Holy takemyjarb, Batman!
Once a new version of the standard, which has the code point for the rupee symbol, is released by the Unicode Consortium, Microsoft will start work to include it in the Windows operating system and other products, Parappil said. He did not specify the time it would take to include the changes. Users will not have to buy new software, but will likely receive downloadable updates to their existing software, he added.
Wow. Because, of course, all computers depend on microsoft software. And there are no devices outside ms or nokia ones. What a stupid article.
Also, why implement more symbols for this? It is absolutely stupid. The first currency sign ever was the Pesos sign ($). Yes, I know you guys know it as the 'dollar sign' but that is just plain wrong. The symbol was created originally in the 18th century to refer to the Spanish Peso.
The peso sign is recognized all around the world, and everyone knows it means money. We also have ISO 4217. Why create new symbols? Use $ generically when everybody reading your doc will now what currency you are talking about, and ISO 4217 anywhere else. It's just three letters. In some cases, you can combine them. For example, here in Argentina we use ARS + $, that is, AR$. We refer to the us dollar as USD or U$D.
Adding new codes for each currency is fairly stupid.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
http://pib.nic.in/archieve/others/2010/jul/image2010071501.jpg
Sudheer Satyanarayana
www.techchorus.net
I'm still waiting for the Unicode symbol for TAFKAP.
Have gnu, will travel.
When I get money, I always use the ":-)" set of characters. Why can't we use emoticons for currency symbols?
Karma: Excellent. 15 moderator points expire sometime.
Rupees? Can't Princess Zelda just make a royal decree and get the symbol added right away?
Did they just jack Prince's sumbol?
The handwriting recognition on my tablet PC is mistaking a lot of punctuation as it is. The rupee symbol sure looks hard to confuse with some other symbol if written properly.
If handwriting recognition can work in far more contexts like math and programming, it would be a major driver for software to handle all the symbols properly, as people would find it really simple to input these symbols.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
Except on Slashdot of course.
Slashdot uses a character whitelist to keep unexpected Unicode characters from breaking the layout. This was instituted after widespread exploitation of the erocS glitch.
How long did it take Hyrule to encode their symbol for the Rupee? I bet a couple Moblins could turn that out in a day or two.
Prince's name to avoid his recording contract was "O(+>".
And at the same time it is based on a Western "R" with the vertical bar removed.
Clever!
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
.. but my guess is that the Western "R"'s great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather is the Devanagari "R".
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
The Cyrillic alphabet has its R, whose glyph is the same as a Latin P. (The Greek capital rho also looks like a Latin P.) This glyph with lines through it is the symbol of Pokemon universe currency.
U+20A8 is the generic symbol for any Rupee and is visually like the letter combination "Rs". The new symbol is specific to the Indian Rupee. It will join the other Unicode codepoints for country specific Rupee symbols:
BENGALI RUPEE MARK 09F2
BENGALI RUPEE SIGN 09F3
GUJARATI RUPEE SIGN 0AF1
TAMIL RUPEE SIGN 0BF9
Sometimes they fool you by walking upright.
Shouldn't he now be called "The artist formally known as the artist formally known as prince"?
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
What kind of ignorant people would marginalise India? That's what they're doing by failing and/or refusing to implement the new symbol.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
We just called him Ampersand.
Was ^H^H^H taken already?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peruvian_nuevo_sol
Anyone notice that its currency sign = S/. (aka Slashdot?)
Some discussion among (mostly disappointed) type designers about the design appears at Typophile.
If you slash some shrubs, maybe you will find some? Their money is kept in breakable jugs as well I hear. OMG this hasn't been used before at all rite?!?!?!?
Come on, admit it - it DOES look a bit like a stylized Sonic the Hedgehog logo ...
Headlines and subjects still seem to act screwy sometimes, and I haven’t found the rhyme or reason to that yet.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
India exports are only $165 billion and ranks 22. Why do they need a New Rupee Symbol?
I'd like to buy homeland for our 10 million people. http://twitter.com/mahadiga
In shops along the border, they have prices in both dollars and pesos. They carefully distinguish, using $ with 1 or 2 vertical lines as appropriate.
Waaa, can any country just declare their currency to have a new symbol or do you have to apply to an international organization?
What about keyboard standardization?
does the symbol go before the number (like the $) or after like the old Rs. ?
Umm, speaking as a Canadian, I would be interested in knowing what the other four "countries" are.
My cousins in Australia and New Zealand would also be interested. Perhaps you could enlighten us.
PLEASE- we beg you!
.
- aqk
F U
One could use "the currency formerly known as rupee"