Tuesday, July 20, 2010

The Indian #rupee

The Indian ministery of finance had a contest for the creation of a currency symbol for the rupee. The winner would get R250,000 and on the 15th of July it was announced that D. Udaya Kumar won the competition.

The winning character is a combination of the Devanagari character Ra and the Latin character R. The jury chose the winner and recommended it for cabinet approval. It did indeed meet cabinet approval announced minister Ambika Soni.


Now that the character for the Indian rupee is official, it needs to become available in fonts for use on computers and on the Internet. As it is a completely new character, it needs to become accepted in the Unicode standard.

On July 19, a "working group document" for the ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2 was published. When this document is accepted, it will be the basis for a glyph in Unicode that will be the standard for derivations in Unicode based fonts. The assignment for an UCS codepoint is urgent as it ensures that all fonts refer to the same glyph.
Thanks,
      GerardM

5 comments:

Shiju said...

Here is the link to the proposal prepared by Michael Everson. http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n3862.pdf

But I am not sure whether this is yet submitted to the Unicode consortium.

As per this suggestion, it seems like U+20B9 will be allocated for the new rupee symbol.

GerardM said...

That is the link behind the "working group document" :) There is a font that uses that location.. It is however not official.
Thanks,
GerardM

bastique said...

Good article, Gerard. Sharing.

Amir said...

There's also an opposing opinion:

http://karnatique.blogspot.com/2010/07/what-does-rupee-symbol-symbolize.html

GerardM said...

The Devanagari script is not only used in the Hindi language, it is used in many languages. The character chosen is a hybrid. As such it will be easily readable and reproducible by people around the world.

Anyway,my message is that once a character has been identified for inclusion in Unicode, a whole host of activities follow.

I identify with language communities and for their right under the sun. My aim is to ensure that they have technically a level playing field. A language is for its people and so is its Wikipedia.
Thanks,
GerardM