Monday, April 13, 2009

India seeks new Rupee symbol

A BBC story (one month old) by Kathryn Westcott reports on India's search for an new recognizable currency symbol for the Rupee.
India would not want a symbol that looked bad when it was turned upside down, [Jasmine Montgomery of design consultancy FutureBrand] says - "like someone's bottom," for example.
Wikipedia reports that there are already several Rupee signs, including ₨ (that's one symbol in Unicode, not an R followed by a p) and रू. The symbol रू confuses me; I don't know how to look it up; perhaps it is the “devanagari letter ra” followed by the “devanagari vowel sign uu”.

Unicode includes other varients like the Bengali Rupee symbol.

The Economic Times lets the reader vote from 19 choices. All of those choices look something like the Latin letter R. I think India could assert its new status as an economic power house by not bowing to European fonts and insist on making the West use a two-character glyph from an Indian font: रू.

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