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."
... 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
1-Pound
2-US Dollars (and cents)
3-Euros
4-Israeli Shekel
5-Japanese Yen/Chinese Renminbi
Off the top of my head. Checking wikipedia, it looks like there are a bunch more
Korean Won -
Thai Baht -
Nigerian Naira -
(great, slashdot strips out the currency characters)
And dozens more...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency_sign
A few currency marks work if you're posting in (Slashdot's brain-damaged idea of) HTML, and you use the standard HTML character entity encoding for them:
Pound: £
Euro: €
Yen: ¥
Of course, HTML 4.01's entity list only has a few currency marks available to begin with, including WTF ever a "general currency mark" is, but Slashcode can't be troubled with those other than the few listed up above.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
There is a generic currency sign in Unicode (and it was also there "back in the good old days", in Latin-1).
Dumb question - What was wrong with the old Rupee symbol?
It wasn't a symbol, but rather just two letters ("Rs"). Which isn't "cool", I guess...
Also what does it mean? The Euro Sign is a stylized E, to represent Europe's currency.
It's a stylized Latin "R" (without the vertical stem, and with two crossbars on top). It is also fairly similar to Devanagari letter corresponding to "R".
The old symbol for Rupee did not exist. You either said Re for Rupee (singular - but hardly used these days since the single Rupee is worth so little) or Rs for Rupees.
Side note: I remember in the old days on the IBM 1403 printers (running with the IBM 1401 machine) there was a symbol that used the space of one character and still printed Rs very close to each other. That was the closest that India ever came to having a symbol for the Rupee.
Until now.
The proposed symbol (which I believe looks very good) is symbolic of a few things:
1) The symbol looks like an R with the vertical leg removed and a horizontal line through it (much like the $ is simply an S with a vertical line | through it).
2) It is also the Hindi symbol for the first letter in the word Rupee in Hindi - with a line through it.
Hope this makes sense
Indian Rediff
All views my own. Anyone else with the same views needs to have his/her head examined.
Your guess is mostly wrong - Latin "R" is derived from greek "P", which is itself derived from a Phoenician letter that looks like reversed "P", and ultimately from Egyptian. Devanagari is likely derived from Phoenician as well, but that's the most recent common point between the scripts, so they're very distant siblings.
Actually it replaces a select few with their HTML character code equivalents, then strips out everything else so that it is 8-bit text. For some reason it also strips out unrecognised HTML character codes (even if they should render a recognised character, such as A).
Some of the ones which I know of that it recognises: a variety of accented letters (e.g. â ü ý), en- and em-dashes (– and —), Euro and Pound currency signs (€ and £), basic fractions (¼, ½, ¾), curly quotation marks (‘ ’ “ ”). However it irritatingly does not recognise the degree symbol (°) or the horizontal ellipsis (…). The angle brackets ( < > ) typically should be encoded as their character code equivalents to avoid them being interpreted as HTML (a lone < will be stripped out to avoid breaking the HTML whereas a lone > is rendered normally). Of course, the ampersand (&) does not usually need to be encoded but if it is necessary it can be encoded as a character code (&), and the quotation mark (") never really needs to be encoded in Slashdot postings but you could if you wanted (").
To see the encoding of the characters in my post, press Reply and then Quote Parent.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.