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India's New Rupee Symbol Won't Show On Computers

Posted by kdawson on from the currency-formerly-known-as-rupee dept.

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."

5 of 252 comments (clear)

  1. Euro by tsa · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

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    -- Cheers!

  2. Isnt there already a Rupee sign? by jonwil · · Score: 3, Interesting

    If there isn't, why is character 20A8 called "Rupee Sign" then?

  3. Symbols in the digital age by wandazulu · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  4. Cool Symbol by hellop2 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

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    How many more years will slashdot have an off-by-one error on your Score in your profile?
  5. happens all the time by jimbomarq · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.