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."

Comments

Re:Isnt there already a Rupee sign?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, which makes the whole discussion totally absurd. It's not unusual at all for one codepoint to encode different glyphs, as long as they're equivalent. U+20A8 has variants already: it looks like "Rs" in some fonts and like "Rp" in others, with or without a bar through the R. It wouldn't hurt anybody except some legislators' pride to reuse that codepoint for the new rupee symbol, as the meaning is identical. This would be the right way to do it: just use the existing codepoint, so fontmakers can take their time to replace the glyph without breaking anything.

And it includes "R"

[wsanders]

And at the same time it is based on a Western "R" with the vertical bar removed.

Clever!