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."
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!
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.
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?
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 don't think "country" is the right word here. There are more than 5 countries using the euro, and there are several countries whose currencies are called "dollars", most of which use the same symbol. So over all, there are definitely more than 5 countries that already have a symbol for their currency.
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.
You are aware that U+00A4 (CURRENCY SIGN) is the proper sign for what you propose? And you are aware that not everyone wants to use a generic currency sign?
The fact that $ is recognized in your country as a generic currency sign doesn't make it that way elsewhere, it's an artifact of you using that sign for your local currency. In Europe $ has a generally recognized, unambiguous meaning: US Dollars. It can mean Canadian Dollars if that is clear from the context but few would apply the sign to a currency that isn't some kind of Dollar*. If used on its own, even while talking about another currency, it's clearly taken to mean US Dollars.
Please let's not use characters in an improper way just because it matches the idiosyncracies of our local region. If you want a generic currency sign, use U+00A4. If a country does want its own sign, let them have it or campaign to have ARS or AR(U+00A4) become standard usage in Argentina so that everyone uses the peoper generic sign.
* The fact that Pesos use the same symbol and had it first is not widely known around here as we have much less exposure to Pesos than to Dollars.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)