Tuesday, July 20, 2010

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 - ௹)

Friday, July 16, 2010

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 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 0.02. ;-) 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.