Re: Unicode 6.2 to Support the Turkish Lira Sign

From: Doug Ewell <doug_at_ewellic.org>
Date: Tue, 29 May 2012 12:00:54 -0700

Asmus Freytag <asmusf at ix dot netcom dot com> wrote:

> Sovereign countries are free to decree currency symbols, whatever
> their motivation or the putative artistic or typographic merits of
> the symbol in question. Not for Unicode to judge.
>
> The simple fact is, the usage scenario for currency symbols is such
> that immediate availability as character code is required by a whole
> country (and its partners in commerce).
>
> Kvetching doesn't make a difference, it just reflects badly -
> especially if it comes from anyone whose country happens to have its
> currency "covered".

Asmus, there's no "ugly American" motivation at work here. I don't mind
one bit if Turkey wants a currency symbol, although I hope for their
sake they are realistic about the benefits such a symbol will bring.

I was specifically, and only, referring to a character proposal—any
proposal—being dubbed "urgent" on the basis that a font hack has been
identified.

N3862 for the Indian rupee sign says:

"A UCS codepoint assignment for this character is urgent. Already at
least one font has been published which puts the character’s glyph at
U+0060 GRAVE ACCENT."

N4258 for the Turkish lira sign says:

"A UCS codepoint assignment for this character is urgent. Already at
least one font has been published which puts the character’s glyph at
U+00A8 DIAERESIS."

We will have to wait and see whether proponents of new characters in the
future (not necessarily currency symbols) distribute their own ASCII or
Latin-1 font hacks in an attempt to speed up the UTC and WG2 encoding
processes.

--
Doug Ewell | Thornton, Colorado, USA
http://www.ewellic.org | @DougEwell ­
Received on Tue May 29 2012 - 14:02:04 CDT

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