New symbol for Indian Rupee

http://www.indianexpress.com/news/IIT-post-graduate-gives-Rupee-its-symbol/646761

by niyazpk • 16 years ago

74 49 16 years ago

Interesting. Looks very pretty but also time consuming to draw - 4 lines and not particularly easy transitions between them. I'll hazard a guess that people will naturally evolve a stripped down version of it for common usage.

nreece• 16 years ago

time consuming to draw - 4 lines

You can write it in just two strokes.

GeneralMaximus• 16 years ago

Pretty easy for those used to writing in Hindi. Write a 'Ra' and a straight line across the middle.

FraaJad3• 16 years ago

You mean Devanagari. Hindi has no script of it's own. Few other Indian languages also use Devanagari. Eg: Sanskrit, Marathi, Konkani.

charliepark• 16 years ago

That's interesting. I saw the contest they were having a week or two back, and don't remember this as one of the entries. I'm not calling shenanigans or anything, but I am curious about it. Of course, I could have just seen it and forgotten it, as I have the memory of a goldfish. Also, I have the memory of a goldfish.

niyazpk• 16 years ago

You are correct. After close scrutiny they shortlisted 5 designs. Later someone high up (in the government) did not like it and so they selected an entirely new design for the symbol. Personally I do like this new one other than the 5 shortlisted ones.

Her you can see the others: http://trak.in/tags/business/2010/07/13/rupee-symbol-shockin...

Retric• 16 years ago

Yea, other than #4 they all look like they would take a while to draw correctly.

balac• 16 years ago

I can't believe the rupee didn't have a symbol, and I can't believe I never noticed!

bluesmoon2• 16 years ago

We'd use Re for singular (ie, Re. 1) and Rs for plural (Rs. 2000)

prog• 16 years ago

Or INR in some cases.

listic• 16 years ago

FYI, the Russian ruble didn't have a symbol, too, until recently.

http://www.artlebedev.com/mandership/159/

Though most currencies have.

stereo• 16 years ago

Many currencies don't. I think governments started noticing when the € symbol became common.

We lost the pretty italian ₤ sign (two stripes, compare to the pound sign £) when we switched to the euro. I also miss the german pfennig sign, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:U%2B20B0_GERMAN_PENNY... . We didn't even get the ¢ symbol in exchange.

eru2• 16 years ago

I never encountered the Pfennig sign in Germany--it must have been out of fashion for at least a few decades. We always seemed to use DM and Pf.

revorad3• 16 years ago

Why does it need a second horizontal line cutting across?

tesseract• 16 years ago

To distinguish from 'ra': http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devanagari#Consonants

revorad3• 16 years ago

I guess so, but it would be easier to just use a dot or more natural just to use the Ru (in devanagari script).

bluesmoon2• 16 years ago

If it didn't, it would just be the devanagari character र (Ra), which would be incorrect since in devanagari, the currently used symbol for the Rupee is रु (Ru). Now the reason they don't use the current devanagari symbol is because that's not representative of the entire country since there are many official languages, and few of them use the devanagari script.

revorad3• 16 years ago

Ha! So they come up with a symbol which is basically a distorted version of the devanagari one.

chaitanya• 16 years ago

The two horizontal lines and the whitespace in the middle signify the tricolours of the Indian flag. http://business.rediff.com/slide-show/2010/jul/15/slide-show...

iambvk• 16 years ago

to get = symbol, which stands for equality (among people, religion,etc)

ugh2• 16 years ago

€ and £ both (can) have two lines, the $ sign can have two lines, too. The two lines seem to me to be a allusion to that. (That’s why the € sign has two lines, anyway.)

psychotik• 16 years ago

So how do they about getting a unicode code-point for this, and the keyboard mapping etc, for something like this?

fhars• 16 years ago

They could either repurpose the old U+20A8 RUPEE SIGN or (less stupid) try to get one of the unallocated Slots U+20B6 to U+20CF following the allocated currency signs.

nailer• 16 years ago

I'd go with B as you say, because per the article Nepal and Pakistan use the existing symbol for their own currencies.

compay2• 16 years ago

It will be interesting to see how this shakes out - the spec for Unicode 6.0 is due in September, theoretically giving them time to add it before the release.

joubert• 16 years ago

Cool. Btw, I like how the South African rand is simply a Latin "R".

khandelwal• 16 years ago

I can't help but think that surely there's better problems to solve. I don't get what's wrong with either INR or Rs - neither of which require a new keyboard.

Setsuna2• 16 years ago

>I can't help but think that surely there's better problems to solve.

This argument comes up every time the government introduces something new.

known• 16 years ago

Will it be embedded in keyboard by default?

mortenjorck• 16 years ago

I wonder if this will catch on faster domestically or internationally. I'm thinking of the curious divide in Japan between the domestic use of the 円 kanji for Yen and the international ¥ symbol.

timcederman• 16 years ago

I thought 円 was equivalent to 'dollar', while ¥ was its currency symbol, equivalent to '$'.

thisduck• 16 years ago

Anyone see any resemblances to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sickle_and_hammer ?

Not that I mind at all.

hernan7• 16 years ago

For some reason this brings back memories of the "austral", the Argentinian currency from the eighties. Had its own symbol and everything - too bad it wasn't available in any computer or typewriter.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentine_peso#Austral.2C_1985....

I think only newspapers had the means to print that symbol non-lamely. For the rest of us, it was capital "A", backspace, equal sign. That was on a typewriter, of course. Don't remember which hack we used when trying to write the symbol on a text processor.

Later on, the zeroes started piling up again (hyperinflation will do that to your currency) and they went back to the "peso" with the more sensible "$" sign.

Found an image of the symbol:

http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Argentine_austral

eru2• 16 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentine_austral also has a symbol and more information.

Absolute Astronomy seems to be a mirror of Wikipedia.

And of course there's also the "Universal Currency Sign" ¤ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency_(typography)), which has it's own history (and can be typed).

New symbol for Indian Rupee

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