More about the Rupee Symbol Unicode

While reading about all the news lately about the new rupee symbol being accepted into Unicode I came across this document about currency symbols in Unicode. It seems that there is already a Unicode character identified as the rupee symbol with hex code 20A8. Special fonts developed should probably replace this character in the font map with out new symbol because though rupee is a common currency in multiple nations, the character20A8 is attributed to India - at least in the currency symbols Unicode document.

If you are wondering what the symbol looks like, here you go - ₨ (If it looks like Rs - try selecting it, its actually a single character) I hope it renders correctly because again how the character renders depends on the font you use and the Unicode support on your computer (browser and OS support).

Again, if you want to show this in HTML, the code is
₨

You'll also notice that the document has codes for the rupee marks in many Indian languages too including Bengali, Gujarati and Tamil.
Bengali Rupee Mark (Hex Code - 09F2, HTML Code - ৲ , Character - ৲)
Bengali Rupee Sign (Hex Code - 09F3, HTML Code - ৳ , Character - ৳)
Gujarati Rupee Sign (Hex Code - 0AF1, HTML Code - ૱ , Character - ૱)
Tamil Rupee Sign (Hex Code - 0BF9, HTML Code - ௹ , Character - ௹)

HTML Code for new Indian Rupee Symbol

Most of you must know that we got our own brand new currency symbol yesterday. It will surely be added to Unicode sometime in the future, but for now we are mostly stuck with using images or special fonts to display this on the computer. I just figured out an easy way to display this until we get our own Unicode character. Its pretty simple - the Devanagari "ra" (र) with a strike-through. It should look like र and its pretty close to what the symbol Here are some options for displaying it in HTML:
<del>&#2352;</del>
or
<del>र</del> in UTF8 text.

We can also use half "sa" and but it might not display properly everywhere. The earlier strike-through version looks closer to the real symbol (especially on IE). The code for half-sa is:
&#2360;&amp;#2381;&#8205;
and it looks like - स्‍

Just my र0.02. ;-) Hope you guys find it useful. By the way you should be able to copy and paste the symbols from here into Word or other applications which support formatting. You should be able to copy and paste the half-sa version into any application - even notepad if it displays correctly on your computer. But just remember that Devanagari Unicode could display differently on different computers.

Tracing the spike... its on Mumbai Mirror!

Earlier this month, on 7th April precisely, visits on writeKA went up 400%. It has tapered down now though there are more visits on average now. It was strange because the increase was proportional across organic searches and direct visits. Now I know the reason. :D writeKA was featured on the Mumbai Mirror newspaper (in print). I don't know if coolsitetoday came first or that (the content is the same), but here's a link to the newspaper's online edition. Now I am all enthusiastic to put out more features again... :-) If anyone has a copy of the print, could you save it and give it to me?

writeKA is the cool site of the day

writeKA has been featured as the cool site of the day on CoolSiteToday - heres the direct link - http://www.coolsitetoday.com/?coolid=1239042600.

writeKA on Twitter

Like everyone else these days, writeka has joined the twitter bandwagon. Follow the latest updates here - http://twitter.com/writeka.

Out of the dark....

Boy, this was such a long week! My regular job sapped up all my time, and I messed up my new server so badly trying to get things customised/upgraded that I had to spend more than a couple of days just getting it into working condition. So yes... my latest feedback was: "You need to choose a better server!" :D Regular users of writeKA - sorry for the inconvenience! I promise this sort of an outage won't happen again unless its beyond my control. I'll plan well in advance before I do something as major as moving to a new server.

Ok, so finally everything is working again, the news is online and so are the scripton services and directory.

A second look....

Its been a long time since I've updated anything on writeKA technologically. I guess the time I devoted to this little hobby project of mine has been realloted to many things including my family, work which has gotten more interesting recently and other projects. Recently I've had to evaluate the amount of money I've been spending on my personal projects and I realized that its way too much. I've been paying out of my pocket to keep writeKA up the last couple of months. I don't think I can afford to continue doing that. I wish I could, because I've really enjoyed working on this website - and the hosting provider is really good. I've decided to move it to something a little less expensive, so the services of writeKA could be down for some time. Considering that I did make changes to improve responsiveness, I don't expect the move to really have any negative impact.