India's New Rupee Symbol Won't Show On Computers

itwbennett writes "It will take at least 18 months for encoding in Unicode the symbol for the Indian rupee that was approved by the Indian cabinet on Thursday. But it may be over two years before the rupee symbol starts showing on computers and mobile phones, analysts said. Many vendors are also undecided whether they will offer the new symbol on keyboards and keypads, or as additions in software to the character set supported by their devices. Nokia, for example, welcomed the move by the Indian government to have a symbol for the rupee. But a company spokeswoman said it's too early to comment on how the symbol will be implemented, whether on the phone keypad or on the character list."

Re:Why use symbols?

[cwebster]

Is the symbol for "Ohm" R in India? I think you are the confused one. And so is the guy selling resistors in units of "R".

Re:Unicode does take its time...

[IANAAC]

this kind of thing should have been coordinated *beforehand*

How so? This was a competition to come up with a new symbol. There were 5 designs that were on the final list and this symbol was the one that was just chosen.

I don't know how you can plan ahead for something like that.

Re:Unicode does take its time...

[dkf]

How so? This was a competition to come up with a new symbol. There were 5 designs that were on the final list and this symbol was the one that was just chosen.

I don't know how you can plan ahead for something like that.

The competition was for the design of the glyph, not for the logical concept of the symbol. Getting the concept into Unicode is what could have been done beforehand, which would have made supporting the symbol fully just a matter of updating everyone's fonts...

Re:India is the 5th country...

[Tim C]

Slashdot strips out (pretty-much) all non-ASCII characters. For a tech site, it's unforgivable.

Re:Why use symbols?

[sznupi]

How the hell did you make that symbol work on Slashdot?

Re:Its nice to see

[leenks]

No, it wouldn't. That code point already has a well defined semantic meaning. If people start using that in the interim it will just make things harder for everyone.

Re:Euro

[jrumney]

I'm pretty sure the Euro symbol was designed several years before the currency ever came into use, so while it might have seemed to be quickly adopted after the introduction of the currency, that was only because the manufacturers all panicked after "don't worry, we've got years to do that" suddenly became "oh shit, we should have done that earlier".

Re:Euro

[hey]

There's the hack then. Use a Devanagari R until most computers handle the Rupee symbol.