Hacker News Reader

Comment by jpatokal | Hacker News Reader

Hmm. I'm not sure this recent trend of coming up with new symbols for currencies needs encouraging:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro_sign

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_rupee_sign

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_lira_sign

From an IT perspective, even the euro sign, finalized in 1996, continues to cause pain. The newer symbols are even worse: I personally spent several hours earlier this year trying to get cross-browser rendering of the new Turkish lira sign without breaking everything in the process. Finally made it more or less work with this Google webfont, specified as the 2nd preference so it used the standard font for rendering everything except the lira sign.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14117547/browser-support-...

View on HN

It might cause pain for the web, but it is pretty routine for other types of software. We added the new Indian Rupee sign to Bloomberg's custom font and at the moment and are integrating it with our hardware.

Having a single currency sign is pretty nice UX for citizens of a country and I'm not sure that countries should be chastised just because they want what those using the Dollar, Pound, Yen, etc have enjoyed for so long. If anything, font designers, font formats, browsers, OS vendors should innovate a bit to make adoption of new characters easier.

This seems like an awfully whiny and egocentric opinion.

Look, the world won’t end if sometimes those symbols cannot be displayed. We do have two or three letter abbreviations for currencies. But in the long it should be our goal to create systems that can deal with new symbols easily and that have the assumptions that symbols will change and new ones will be introduced built into them. Because that’s how it is. Actually.

It seems to me here that in this case it’s very much the web that’s broken, not the new symbol.

But what's the benefit or rationale for having a new symbol? As far as I can tell, it seems to mostly consist of thinly veiled nationalism: "all the big countries have one, so we need one too". See for example this:

Now India wants something that no global economic powerhouse should be without: an international symbol for its currency. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7923825.stm

And it's not as if the existing "Rs", "TL", "KSh" etc don't work. So by introducing a new symbol, the country creates a lot of real problems (not just in IT, but for everybody who needs to enter or display the new symbol; where's the " ₹" button on your keyboard?), just for a vague sense of nationalist pride and prestige.

Is there anything wrong with that? If the Kenyan Shilling is as important as they describe in the article, then why should they have to be stuck with a second rate symbol using latin letters? Do you think the Euro should just use $ or EU$ or something else that doesn't convey the fact that the euro is not called the Euro dollar, but has its own name?

One of the reasons I like using OS X is that, from what I can tell, 99.99% of developers don't have to worry about this stuff. They let the system handle text and font rendering, and when the new Kenyan Shilling symbol is adopted, their apps will render it without having to do any work.

As it happens, $ is originally the peso sign. When is the US going to stop using a secondhand symbol shamelessly stolen from the Mexicans?

At the end of the day, you don't need unique symbols to distinguish currencies, because 99.9% of the time you're only dealing with one at a time and, for the remaining 0.01%, there are ISO standard codes that are guaranteed unique. (Unlike "$", mind you.) In Finland, prices at markets were usually written "5,-" in the pre-euro days, and that perfectly clear notation continues to be used after the mark was switched to the euro.

The dash in "5,-" simply means that there are no decimals. When you write a price like this which does have decimals, it looks just like a regular number, for example "4,99"... And then you may need something to indicate the unit.

The euro sign is a good solution because it resolves the ambiguity of how to write out the currency unit. Here are some ways how the price 0.99 EUR can be written in Finnish:

  0,99 euroa
  99 senttiä
  0,99 EUR
  0,99 €

Multiply this by 20+ nations and you get a lot of different ways to write a price...! Without the euro symbol, there wouldn't be a single reasonably consistent way to write a price in the Euro zone.

Don't forget that there are countries in the Euro zone that use the Greek and Cyrillic alphabets. Just the word "euro" spelled out may be unrecognizable if you don't know the alphabet.

The European banknotes have the word "EURO" on them three different ways: Romance (EURO), Greek (ΕΥΡΩ), and (since 2013) Cyrillic (ЕВРО).

I swear I once saw a picture which was like a Huffman coding table for the spelling of Europe in every European language, but I can't find it now - anyone seen it? It started with a big E, and then had U and Y above on another, and so on.

It's on the energy rating cards that appliances have too.

Thanks! That's the one, I remember the coloured bars next to it now, and it's the word energy, not Europe. See one at http://blog.calpeda.com/2011/08/calpeda-europump/

It makes trouble for us that DO use a "peso" as official currency.

In our countries, the US dollar is normally written as U$S, U$, or US$.

Such temerity! They'll want their own flag next.

In the short term, it's true that it causes some pain, but it does look very much better, and in the longer term it'll work fine.

If browser manufacturers had only ever implemented things that were currently supported, we'd never have got anywhere at all. Progress has a period of pain followed by later benefits.

IT exists to facilitate other things, not to force other things into the IT structure.

Wasn't there something I saw about growing support for rendering ligatures automatically? In which case, it seems like you could just use K$ as an encoding and have browsers render it right when they can and wrong but legible when they can't.

What kind of problems have you seen with the euro sign? Are you talking about badly designed free fonts which render terribly and have missing glyphs?

This is not about "coming up with new symbols" - there isn't a current symbol for Kenya's currency. Currencies, country codes and languages are subject to change over the years and our tech should embrace that.

IEC 8859-1 (Latin1) vs IEC 8859-15 (Latin9) is the main bugbear: whenever you see ¤ instead of €, this is the cause, and there's an awful lot of data in and software expecting Latin1 still out there.

Actually the Indian rupee sign needs to be distinguished from the Sri Lankan rupee, the Pakistani rupee, the Nepali rupee.. etc., all of whom use "Rs" (U+20A8) as a prefix[1] The usecase is pretty validated there.

Plus there is a logic to the Indian rupee sign and is not just an alphabet with two slashes - its the letter R written in Hindi and in English simultaneously . Pretty cool IMHO (and a shout out to IIT Bombay [2] !!!)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_rupee_sign [2] http://www.idc.iitb.ac.in/events/Indian_Rupee_Symbol.pdf

And why do you think the rupee sign, if successful in India, would not be adopted by the rest as well? "$" is by no means limited to the Mexican peso it was originally intended for.

And yes, I do agree that the rupee sign is a little masterpiece of typography, but that's somewhat beside my point -- the inconvenience of switching to anything is the same.

I'm not sure this trend of IT's typography encoding making the introduction of new symbols difficult needs encouraging.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com