Monday, July 19, 2010

Added New Indian Rupee symbol — INR to Lohit Devanagari



Friday saw the news on new symbol for INR, i felt really happy since the prevoious one U+20A8 ₨ was based on latin shortname for Rupees, and never it was looking like symbol. Just capital R and small S combination.

That's why it was really less in use, and many people were not aware of this. While checking in locale i found this one only used in en_IN locale. Other locale were using locale initial for rupees. i.e in Marathi and Hindi रु. was used for currency symbol. Same for Other language in there own script.

Standardization is really favourite topic of mine and really with this one we can standardize INR symbol.


Now all developers are waiting to get Unique Code Point for this symbol. i.e Unicode Value. We have for all other currency symbols see http://unicode.org/charts/PDF/U20A0.pdf

I am strongly recommend to add this symbol also on same Unicode code page.

in excitement /me also added this characters in lohit devanagari fonts and committed to upstream svn :)

Since no Unicode values is assigned to this, there is no standard for typing or storing this character.

I just added so if any person want to give reference to this symbol can easily use lohit fonts and do so

I have added this character on U+E000, which is unicode private user area.

So anyone want to type and use this characters just enter U+E000 with any method you know or ask me here :)

This is private use area so we can use this for any general purpose, please note when we will get actual value we just need to replace U+E000 with the new unicode value, thats it

I saw some people http://blog.foradian.com/ added new INR symbol on ` location, but this is one kind of unicode spoofing.

Since in actual storage you are going to store ` (U+0060) and whenever you want to type ` character you will only get new INR symbol.


So this is wrong thing and i recommend to use some private user area location, so it will not conflict with existing Unicode Encoding Standard

Download Lohit Font with addition of new INR symbol at U+E000

for more information about Lohit project see  see https://fedorahosted.org/lohit/

5 comments:

उन्मुक्त said...

अरे वाह।

Arjun said...

Why don't you add it at U+20A8? That is the encoding for the Rupee symbol. The only reason most fonts depicted it as "Rs" was that until now, we didn't have a symbol. Now that we have one, please add it to the correct location and not in the PUA.

Pravin Satpute said...

adding it at U+20A8 will make lohit unicode non-compliant and we surely don't want to do that for lohit.

better to not make spoofing, since we are storing code for ₨ and showing user wrong character.

Unicode has given PUA only for temporary code assignment and we are using it for specified purpose.

I am sure soon we will get Unicode code point for new INR symbol, so that time we can use it, and can easily do just find-replace with the temporary used code point, since it is private user area (PUA) it will not conflict with any other presently used Indic Unicode character as well

amachu said...

Is this done for Lohit Tamil also?

Pravin Satpute said...

Yes, in Lohit Tamil as well.