From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Thu Mar 12 2009 - 06:32:08 CST
The difficulty will be that the symbol should look well along with all the
representation of digits in the various Indic scripts, should not be
confused with any of their letters or punctuation, and should also work
within Latin and Arabic written texts (just because they are also official
scripts for official languages of India).
Unlike with the euro symbol (which was desinged after the Latin script but
was still compatible with the Greek and Cyrillic scripts), it will not be
possible to choose a glyph that is composed with glyph parts looking similar
to letters of a single Indic script because they are too much different
between each others. Clearly, if a glyph is chosen that ressembles too much
to some abbreviation of the Rupee name in any one of the official scripts,
it could be unacceptable for the population using other native scripts.
Interestingly, I think that the current "Rp" sign could survive this reform,
because it will still be accurate for usage within Latin-written texts
(notably English). But the alternative could be that India designs several
glyphs for the currency, depending on the script context where it will be
used, or that the symbol chosen appears to be completely neutral for the
script where it will be used, if it keeps a simle design that is simple to
draw with very few strokes.
For this reason, the symbol should not use the horizontal connection used in
some of the Indic scripts (including Devanagari which does not use this
connection for digits), and it should avoid the vertical main orientation
(to avoid confusion with dandas). It should avoid also to look too much like
a circle with some bars (because it could not work with all the indic digits
like in Malayalam, Telugu or Kannada, or could be confused with some
existing letters). However it should be as simple to draw as the digits in
all these scripts, and immediately identifiable as a currency symbol
associated with a numeric value.
A simple proposal for such symbol would be to use a glyph like the
mathematical infinite symbol with a double danda overstriking it in the
middle, because the dandas are typical of most of the Indic scripts and
behave like punctuations (a role sometimes assigned as well to currency
symbols as delimiters or separators) and because the infinite symbol
represents a number that cannot be represented by a single digit, but that
has a value by itself (just like the invention of the zero digit and its
very early adoption in all Brahmic scripts).
________ # # _______ (ascent line)
# #
#### # # ####
#### ### ### ####
## # ## # ##
## # ## # ##
#### ### ### ####
#### # # ####
# #
________ # __ # _______ (base line)
> -----Message d'origine-----
> De : unicode-bounce@unicode.org
> [mailto:unicode-bounce@unicode.org] De la part de Michael Everson
> Envoyé : mardi 10 mars 2009 23:23
> À : unicode Unicode Discussion
> Objet : Re: India seeks Rupee status symbol
>
>
> On 10 Mar 2009, at 21:28, Kenneth Whistler wrote:
>
> > If India comes up with a new symbol for their currency,
> Unicode should
> > just encode a new character for the symbol.
>
> Fine.
>
> By the way my idea wouldn't work. I thought to use RU in
> Brahmi but it just looks like a backwards L.
>
> Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com
>
>
>
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