Re: Character Identity of the Turkish Lira Sign (was: Re: Unicode 6.2 to Support the Turkish Lira Sign)

From: Philippe Verdy <verdy_p_at_wanadoo.fr>
Date: Wed, 23 May 2012 23:45:14 +0200

2012/5/23 Karl Pentzlin <karl-pentzlin_at_acssoft.de>:
> This leads me to the suspicion that even the winning entry is simply
> a L with two horizontal strokes (thus being a glyph variant of U+2C60
> LATIN CAPITAL LETTER L WITH DOUBLE BAR), with the right upturn of the
> base – as you can only win such a competition if you show at least some
> creativity and fanciness, rather than entering a straightforward
> design like a plain with the "usual currency bar" (i.e. double bar),
> in analogy to e.g. ₦ U+20A6 NAIRA SIGN (simply a Latin N with double
> bar).

I have the same opinion, but then the British pound also obeys the
same definition, given the many variants of the Latin capital L, which
includes such cursive style. But the Turkish Lira symbol is definitely
not cursive, the way it was designed.

Some other may think it was based on the lowercase t (like Turkey),
with an extra horizontal stroke, and will render it like this, even if
this causes confusions with the euro symbol in some cases (even when
using the winning design, later modified by the Turkish government to
slant the double strokes before becoming official, confusion has
already been observed... I even think that the risk of confusion with
the euro symbol is even higher with the modified design, and that
finaly the LATIN CAPITAL LETTER L WITH DOUBLE BAR would cause much
less problems and would have been easier to draw and recognize
distinctly when used as a currency symbol near a displayed price...)

For all these reasons, we can expect a period of experimentation, then
some resistances, and finally another modified design to be used (even
if the new bank notes and coins are not changed immediately). So I
wonder why there's an emergency to encode it.

When the Euro symbol was initially introduced, it was said (usefully)
that the superposition of C= was good enough, before it was widely
made avalable in fonts, keyboards and applications. The same could be
used for the Turkish lira during an interim period, except that they
already have a good character for it, which is already encoded at
U+2C60, and not used for any other currency, and that cannot cause any
confusion.
Received on Wed May 23 2012 - 16:46:35 CDT

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