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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."
How so? This was a competition to come up with a new symbol. There were 5 designs that were on the final list and this symbol was the one that was just chosen.
I don't know how you can plan ahead for something like that.
The competition was for the design of the glyph, not for the logical concept of the symbol. Getting the concept into Unicode is what could have been done beforehand, which would have made supporting the symbol fully just a matter of updating everyone's fonts...
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
There's the hack then. Use a Devanagari R until most computers handle the Rupee symbol.