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!
... 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.
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
"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
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: "?==$"'
Batman: Hmmm... It looks like he's gotten into the Indian money market.
Robin: However did you guess that, Batman?
Batman: You just have to overlap the ... what am I explaining this to you for? When we get to India, I am totally replacing you with a cheaper Indian model.
Robin: Holy takemyjarb, Batman!
I'm still waiting for the Unicode symbol for TAFKAP.
Have gnu, will travel.
1.00$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.
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.
There is a generic currency sign in Unicode (and it was also there "back in the good old days", in Latin-1).
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.
Do you mean control-D?
We use to have fun putting that as the first byte in someones .login file.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.