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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."
Back in the good old days, we had ascii 004- which gave us a nice little diamond symbol. What happened to that?
If I had my way, real life symbols would resemble the symbols in games- like gem shapes.
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
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!
... to get a symbol for its currency. Congratulations!
... 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
Its nice to see that they have used a devanagari character (0930 ) as the basis for this.
Is fine Benny Lava! Minor bun engine made Benny Lava! Anybody need this symbol Benny Lava?
Just give the job to the counterfeiters, they'll have it out in a couple of months.
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.
I disagree. Stating an amount of money is an important and common enough thing that it deserves its own symbol. It also prevents confusion in some cases, e.g. what if you're buying a 15R resistor?
And € is great.
"Nokia, for example, welcomed the move by the Indian government to have a symbol for the rupee.". Not surprising since a huge portion of Nokia's hardware and software development is now done in Hyderabad, India.
Don't go changing it yet. The Russians may want something too similar to it like a capitol R with two lines through the top. But, since the Russians and the Indians are close allies the Russians may let them have it.
Is the symbol for "Ohm" R in India? I think you are the confused one. And so is the guy selling resistors in units of "R".
Legend of Zelda games have had the same rupee symbol for years!
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?
Many countries have same symbol for their currencies - $. It is more confusing to me.
Sudheer Satyanarayana
www.techchorus.net
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'm so proud to be Indian today!!
:)
Because my currency will show up on computers and mobile devices in 2 years.
Robin: The Riddler has escaped of Gotham! He left a note!
Note: 'Riddle me this, Batman - solve this equation: "?==$"'
Batman: Hmmm... It looks like he's gotten into the Indian money market.
Robin: However did you guess that, Batman?
Batman: You just have to overlap the ... what am I explaining this to you for? When we get to India, I am totally replacing you with a cheaper Indian model.
Robin: Holy takemyjarb, Batman!
Once a new version of the standard, which has the code point for the rupee symbol, is released by the Unicode Consortium, Microsoft will start work to include it in the Windows operating system and other products, Parappil said. He did not specify the time it would take to include the changes. Users will not have to buy new software, but will likely receive downloadable updates to their existing software, he added.
Wow. Because, of course, all computers depend on microsoft software. And there are no devices outside ms or nokia ones. What a stupid article.
Also, why implement more symbols for this? It is absolutely stupid. The first currency sign ever was the Pesos sign ($). Yes, I know you guys know it as the 'dollar sign' but that is just plain wrong. The symbol was created originally in the 18th century to refer to the Spanish Peso.
The peso sign is recognized all around the world, and everyone knows it means money. We also have ISO 4217. Why create new symbols? Use $ generically when everybody reading your doc will now what currency you are talking about, and ISO 4217 anywhere else. It's just three letters. In some cases, you can combine them. For example, here in Argentina we use ARS + $, that is, AR$. We refer to the us dollar as USD or U$D.
Adding new codes for each currency is fairly stupid.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
http://pib.nic.in/archieve/others/2010/jul/image2010071501.jpg
Sudheer Satyanarayana
www.techchorus.net
I'm not confused. In addition to denoting a resistance by Ohms, they are often labelled like this:
1R2 = 1.2 Ohm
1k2 = 1.2 kOhm
1M2 = 1.2 MOhm
(i.e. the letter replaces the decimal point and also indicates the SI prefix.)
And so on, so 1500R would be 1500 Ohm (although you'd probably use 1k5).
I'm still waiting for the Unicode symbol for TAFKAP.
Have gnu, will travel.
When I get money, I always use the ":-)" set of characters. Why can't we use emoticons for currency symbols?
Karma: Excellent. 15 moderator points expire sometime.
If you're in that country, rupee usage should be common enough to be assumed.
If you're far away from that country, chances are you don't have any idea what the hell that symbol is. And being a symbol, it's almost impossible to look up.
Really, this will help people on the borders of the country, or who interact with India all of the time. It's a nice shorthand for 15 R Indian.
To everyone else, it's one more confusing Kanji they will never be able to look up.
The ______ Agenda
Rupees? Can't Princess Zelda just make a royal decree and get the symbol added right away?
How the hell did you make that symbol work on Slashdot?
One that hath name thou can not otter
1.00$USD
1.00$CAN
1.00$AU
Alternate ways of writing the above:
1.00 freedom dollar
1.00 dollar, eh?
You call that a dollar? THAT's a dollar.
Did they just jack Prince's sumbol?
And being a symbol, it's almost impossible to look up
Oh? Just copy & paste to Google search.
If you want to see confusing - guess the currency / country which I'm using here: $.
One that hath name thou can not otter
And being a symbol, it's almost impossible to look up.
To everyone else, it's one more confusing Kanji they will never be able to look up.
Do we assume they do not have access to Google, and the ability to type the character? Eg query google for "what is "...
The handwriting recognition on my tablet PC is mistaking a lot of punctuation as it is. The rupee symbol sure looks hard to confuse with some other symbol if written properly.
If handwriting recognition can work in far more contexts like math and programming, it would be a major driver for software to handle all the symbols properly, as people would find it really simple to input these symbols.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
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.
Prince's name to avoid his recording contract was "O(+>".
.. but my guess is that the Western "R"'s great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather is the Devanagari "R".
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
use the html entity "& euro ;" (no spaces or quotes)
If I have nothing to hide, you have no reason to search me
The Cyrillic alphabet has its R, whose glyph is the same as a Latin P. (The Greek capital rho also looks like a Latin P.) This glyph with lines through it is the symbol of Pokemon universe currency.
U+20A8 is the generic symbol for any Rupee and is visually like the letter combination "Rs". The new symbol is specific to the Indian Rupee. It will join the other Unicode codepoints for country specific Rupee symbols:
BENGALI RUPEE MARK 09F2
BENGALI RUPEE SIGN 09F3
GUJARATI RUPEE SIGN 0AF1
TAMIL RUPEE SIGN 0BF9
Sometimes they fool you by walking upright.
Kanji?? What does the rupee symbol have to do with Japanese?
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
Shouldn't he now be called "The artist formally known as the artist formally known as prince"?
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
What kind of ignorant people would marginalise India? That's what they're doing by failing and/or refusing to implement the new symbol.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
HTML entities
€
or
€
Climate Progress - Hell and High Water
Was ^H^H^H taken already?
Well, technically you don't need the "D" in "USD" if you've already used the "$" ;)
I prefer "USD 1.00" etc. when I'm actually dealing with the risk of international currency confusion.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peruvian_nuevo_sol
Anyone notice that its currency sign = S/. (aka Slashdot?)
Some discussion among (mostly disappointed) type designers about the design appears at Typophile.
Come on, admit it - it DOES look a bit like a stylized Sonic the Hedgehog logo ...
Actually I just typed it (alt-gr + 4). Maybe slashdot have finally fixed their system!
€€€
£££ (pounds never worked before)
Headlines and subjects still seem to act screwy sometimes, and I haven’t found the rhyme or reason to that yet.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
It's a pirate resistor.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
India exports are only $165 billion and ranks 22. Why do they need a New Rupee Symbol?
I'd like to buy homeland for our 10 million people. http://twitter.com/mahadiga
In shops along the border, they have prices in both dollars and pesos. They carefully distinguish, using $ with 1 or 2 vertical lines as appropriate.
(doesn't work on preview; probably won't when posting...and I even just copied the euro symbols from your post above! It seems quite erratic...)
One that hath name thou can not otter