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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!
... 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.
India is the 5th country...to get a symbol for its currency.
Ummm... The Unicode Code Charts show many more than 5 country's currency symbols. And the currency code section has room for 23 more currency symbols.
1-Pound
2-US Dollars (and cents)
3-Euros
4-Israeli Shekel
5-Japanese Yen/Chinese Renminbi
Off the top of my head. Checking wikipedia, it looks like there are a bunch more
Korean Won -
Thai Baht -
Nigerian Naira -
(great, slashdot strips out the currency characters)
And dozens more...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency_sign
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".
"You can't be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline - it helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer." -Frank Zappa
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?
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.
Slashdot strips out (pretty-much) all non-ASCII characters. For a tech site, it's unforgivable.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Robin: The Riddler has escaped of Gotham! He left a note!
Note: 'Riddle me this, Batman - solve this equation: "?==$"'
Batman: Hmmm... It looks like he's gotten into the Indian money market.
Robin: However did you guess that, Batman?
Batman: You just have to overlap the ... what am I explaining this to you for? When we get to India, I am totally replacing you with a cheaper Indian model.
Robin: Holy takemyjarb, Batman!
I'm still waiting for the Unicode symbol for TAFKAP.
Have gnu, will travel.
Yes - perhaps the slashcoders should read http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html ?
How the hell did you make that symbol work on Slashdot?
One that hath name thou can not otter
1.00$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.
This would eliminate most of the Middle East. Zappa was a genius!
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
A few currency marks work if you're posting in (Slashdot's brain-damaged idea of) HTML, and you use the standard HTML character entity encoding for them:
Pound: £
Euro: €
Yen: ¥
Of course, HTML 4.01's entity list only has a few currency marks available to begin with, including WTF ever a "general currency mark" is, but Slashcode can't be troubled with those other than the few listed up above.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
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.
use the html entity "& euro ;" (no spaces or quotes)
If I have nothing to hide, you have no reason to search me
Slashdot strips out some Unicode. Essentially, Slashdot has all of US-ASCII plus parts of various ISO-8859 encodings. However, for instance, ISO-8859-15's Euro symbol isn't supported.
One gets the feeling that the devs simply didn't want to actually look at how Unicode works and which characters are safe (and how to test for them efficiently). Yes, you could probably use similar-looking characters to spoof URLs but doesn't Slashdot show the domain names of links next to the links themselves for exactly that reason?
It's a bit ridiculous to not be able to use technical symbols, the IPA or even the Euro symbol because the site wants to protect itself from control characters.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Your guess is mostly wrong - Latin "R" is derived from greek "P", which is itself derived from a Phoenician letter that looks like reversed "P", and ultimately from Egyptian. Devanagari is likely derived from Phoenician as well, but that's the most recent common point between the scripts, so they're very distant siblings.
Actually it replaces a select few with their HTML character code equivalents, then strips out everything else so that it is 8-bit text. For some reason it also strips out unrecognised HTML character codes (even if they should render a recognised character, such as A).
Some of the ones which I know of that it recognises: a variety of accented letters (e.g. â ü ý), en- and em-dashes (– and —), Euro and Pound currency signs (€ and £), basic fractions (¼, ½, ¾), curly quotation marks (‘ ’ “ ”). However it irritatingly does not recognise the degree symbol (°) or the horizontal ellipsis (…). The angle brackets ( < > ) typically should be encoded as their character code equivalents to avoid them being interpreted as HTML (a lone < will be stripped out to avoid breaking the HTML whereas a lone > is rendered normally). Of course, the ampersand (&) does not usually need to be encoded but if it is necessary it can be encoded as a character code (&), and the quotation mark (") never really needs to be encoded in Slashdot postings but you could if you wanted (").
To see the encoding of the characters in my post, press Reply and then Quote Parent.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
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)
€
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
What we call "Greek alphabet" today is not the Greek alphabet, and it came in pretty late in the grand scheme of things. The older, indigenous stuff is Linear B.
As for Indians, they didn't copy it directly from Phoenicians, but it went a very roundabout way through the original Brahmic script. Again, this was a relatively late addition (later than Greek, actually). This one is more hypothetical, though there is strong evidence in favor.
Ultimately, it seems to be that Egyptians were simply one of the first nations to build an empire sufficiently large and advanced that it required a well-defined writing system to run it (other being Chinese and Japanese). As others came later, they more often than not picked what was already there, and developed it further. Makes sense to me, and in some way reminds me of that Vinge novel where, centuries later, the code for their future systems was still using a basic Unix timer, counting seconds since 1970, somewhere in its kernel.