On Wed, 4 Apr 2001, James Kass wrote:
> Currency symbols should probably be encoded without
> delay, but is this really a currency symbol? It appears
> to be the word "rial" written in Arabic.
I agree. But we need it for round-trip compatiblity with the national
character set. There is a difference between "Reh Alef Yeh Lam" and "Rial"
in the users' text files, and that should be respected.
> In Roozbeh Pournader's proposal, justification is given that
> "rial" has existed for a long time as a single keystroke on
> Iranian keyboards, but is this sufficient?
My own position in HCI (national governmental body responsible for IT
standards) has been against asking for encoding it. But after I found that
we cannot map a key to a sequence of characters in X, that changed. And
this is perhaps the only key on a standard keyboard that doesn't have a
character in Unicode.
> The proposal mentions also that "rial" is typically rendered with
> letters which are more narrow than the norm, but might this be because
> of the physical limitations imposed by being fit onto one typewriter
> key?
Not only typewriters, but also on price tags that the extra width was an
obstacle.
> Precedents exist for encoding Arabic words/phrases in
> Unicode as single code points, see U+FDFA and U+FDFB.
> If "rial" is to be encoded, perhaps the Arabic Presentation
> Forms range would be the best place.
Exactly.
> In an older book covering Iranian coinage one can find, in
> addition to "rial", other monetary units like "dinar", "toman",
> "kran (qiran)", etc. The letters forming any of these
> monetary unit words might combine calligraphically to
> form unique and beautiful ligatures, but perhaps this
> should be treated as a display/fonts issue rather than
> an encoding issue.
But no one has asked (or will ask) for them. I'll promise :) Rial is the
national currency, it is in a standard character set, and it is on a
standard keyboard. And we only ask for it to be encoded in a deprecated
block. Too much?
BTW, I found your comments really helpful... Thanks a lot.
--roozbeh
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Jul 06 2001 - 00:17:15 EDT