From: Kenneth Whistler (kenw@sybase.com)
Date: Tue Mar 10 2009 - 16:57:17 CST
Raymond Mercier responded:
> Kenneth Whistler writes
>
> >I suggest we don't. That is just a silly idea, after the "Rs"
> >U+20A8 RUPEE SIGN has been in the standard for 18 years.
>
> It's a lot older than that. I have a volume of a journal dated
> 1902 with "Price Rs. 9-0 per annum", printed on the cover
> (note the italics).
Oh, of course. I'm not claiming that the use of the
convention "Rs" or "Rs." to abbreviate the rupee currency
and stand as a currency symbol for it dates from 1991.
It is much older than that.
I was only claiming that as an encoded character in the
Unicode Standard (with the current glyph) it dates
from 1991 (and in ISO/IEC 10646 from 1993).
For reasons already cited on this thread, it would be a very
bad idea to change the glyph of U+20A8 RUPEE SIGN to
some new design.
If India designs and standardizes on a new currency symbol,
we can just encode a new character to represent it.
BTW, this discussion is recapitulating positions taken
a dozen years ago, back in late 1996 and early 1997, when
we were debating the addition of what became U+20AC EURO SIGN.
Some folks back then wanted to just change the glyph
of the existing U+20A0 EURO-CURRENCY SIGN -- and we had
to push up FAQs for awhile after Unicode 2.1 came out
emphasizing that the EURO SIGN was U+20AC and *NOT*
U+20A0. Fortunately, the right decisions were taken back
then, and things eventually sorted themselves out correctly.
--Ken
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