From: Marco Cimarosti (marco.cimarosti@essetre.it)
Date: Mon Sep 30 2002 - 14:20:53 EDT
John Cowan wrote:
> My suspicion is that the one-bar-vs.-two is normal glyphic variation,
> the same as with the $ sign.
The same should be true for the £ sign.
But unluckily, for some obscure reason, Unicode thinks that currencies
called "pound" should have one bar and be encoded with U+00A3, while
currencies called "lira" should have two bars and be encoded with U+20A4.
The problem is that "lira" is just the Italian for "pound"... So, for
instance, the currency called in English "Cyprus pound" is called "lira
cipriota" in Italian.
Should the currency of a Greek/Turkish speaking country be encoded
differently depending on whether it is pronounced in English or Italian?
(Rhetoric question)
Similarly, "yen" is just the Japanese (kun) pronunciation of Chinese "yuan".
IMHO, the preferred symbol for both currencies should be U+00A5.
(BTW, U+FFE5 is just a compatibility variant of U+00A5, and I don't think
it's a good idea using it for anything apart round-trip conversion of CJK
character sets.)
The ono-bar vs. two-bars variant is just one of many typographical
differences that may be noticed in Japanese vs. Chinese typography.
Just my ¥0.02 :-)
Ciao.
Marco
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