From: Kenneth Whistler (kenw@sybase.com)
Date: Wed Jul 09 2003 - 21:25:43 EDT
Asmus wrote:
> Unicode assigns the general category value, "Sk", or "Symbol, [k]urrency"
> to all characters whose *primary* function is to act as a currency symbol.
recte: "Sc", or "Symbol, [c]urrency"
"Sk" is for "Symbol, modifier", referring basically to spacing accents
and other similar diacritics.
>
> That excludes all characters that have other, unrelated uses, as long as
> those are not more specialized than the use as currency sign. That's an
> uwritten, but workable definition and it has so far not lead to too many
> issues in deciding whether or not to classify a character as Sk.
To date, proposals to encode "currency signs" have always been
clearly indicated as such. Case in point: the recent, successful
proposal to encode currency symbols for the guaraní and the
austral signs. So in practice, the issue has never been a
serious problem for the committee.
The occasional use of Han characters such as U+5186 in
formatting of currency amounts is more akin to the use
of the ideographs for 'year', 'month', and 'day' in formatted
dates. Such usage is similar to the use of many, many other
ideographs as numerical classifiers in Chinese (and
derivatively in Japanese). As others have noted, the
particular usage of such in expressing currency amounts
does not make them currency signs in the sense used in
the Unicode Standard.
--Ken
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