On 5/23/2012 11:01 AM, Jukka K. Korpela wrote:
>
>
>> Note also that the German mark was pretty much always just "DM"
>
> Well, looking at my stamp collection, I can see old German stamps with
> symbols that look like script-style “m” (with the height of digits)
> and script-style “M”.
>
Correct. And typewriters of the period had keys for them.
If you go back 100 years you'll find quite a number of currencies with
such traditional symbols or conventional letter forms.
The post-WWII period of continental European currencies being
consistently designated by strings of ordinary letters owes much to the
limitations of technology at the time. Updating a font is easier than
updating a typewriter, and later, the data processing was firmly rooted
in small character sets.
If the Euro had been invented/deployed 20 years earlier, my suspicion is
that in everyday life it might well have not had a dedicated symbol for
an extended period.
However, now the rules have changed (thanks to Unicode, in part) and the
infrastructure exists to deliver products that will support widely used
symbols in very short time frames.
The typographers may not like that they won't be given the time to allow
them to organically grow a design, but fonts are appearing and are using
dubious encodings - thus the need for Unicode to act quickly - and
decisively.
A./
Received on Wed May 23 2012 - 14:04:10 CDT
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