When will the Rupee symbol be officially released?

rupee_symbol A few days back India launched a new symbol to represent Indian rupee. This is a proud moment for every Indian as it places us in the elite club of countries like US, UK, Japan who have been enjoying a unique symbol for their currency for past so many years.

Ever since the rupee symbol was unveiled, there has been a lot of confusion as to when will it be officially available on computer, and those who can’t wait for that to happen, have already found ways to use it by installing a font developed by Forodian Technologies.

The general buzz is what is making the wait so long? If a small company can come up with a font within a day, what is stopping giants like Microsoft to do so?

To understand this, you need to understand how a symbol makes to the keyboards or to the Unicode list.

To be used as a character, a symbol needs to make it to the “Unicode Standard List” – a list which is maintained by the Unicode Consortium that contains all the symbols that you see on your keyboard or use through short cut keys (like ALT+0128 for €). Once it finds a place in the list, it gets a unique code (like that for €).

To add the symbol to the Unicode list, the Unicode Consortium must receive an application from the Indian Government. Once the application is received, the symbol would be encoded and assigned a codepoint in the next version of Unicode Standards (current version being 5.2.0). The date for the next release of Unicode has not been decided yet, according to their official website.

Only after the symbol gets the unique codepoint from Unicode, companies like Microsoft can use it for their products.

Knowing the way Indian government works, it might take some time before you can actually use the new rupee symbol in your mails or word documents. 😛

For now you can flaunt the new symbol by using the font developed by Mangalore based Forodian Technologies. But since this is not a standard font, avoid using it when sending a document to someone else, because if the person doesn’t have the font installed on their system, they will only see a ~ symbol.

10 Comments

Aditya Kane July 20, 2010

Your comment was never deleted but I was only checking on the link you included. This post is not really about Foradian’s creating the new symbol in a font. It only refers to the font and adds a precaution on using it as it is not a global update but only people who download the font will see the new rupee symbol. The post is mainly about the process of it getting standardized in unicode.

ankit shah July 20, 2010

1) Ok agreed that it was not About creating the new symbol in a font but it was certainly an additional information by me. did i post anything abusive???? yes or no??

2)and i am regular to your blog and next day after my comment (which was never posted) what i see is same thing about creating a font.(i am sorry i refer other blogs too but never seen about how to create new rupee symbol)

Aditya Kane July 20, 2010

@Ankit: You are most welcome to comment on DW as always but as I wrote before that when there is a link inserted into a comment it can take a bit of time before I approve it. If you visited my earlier post your comment appears since past 12 hours. Sorry if it took time, but usually when a link is introduced I need to research it a bit more before I approve it. This might mean that other generic comments which are without links might get approved before. Sorry for any anguish it caused you.

Anshul July 20, 2010

I understand your frustration on not seeing your comment published, but you should think twice before using such harsh words. As Aditya said, this post is not about the font developed by Foradian. I just mentioned about it in a line which made you say that I have stolen it from you. The news about this font is going around media and online like a fire, so I don’t have to read your comment to find about it.

Santanu July 20, 2010

Forodian Technologies, They think they are mastermind after creating that font, which anyone can creat or make themself in their computer lol

Anshul July 20, 2010

Well they are mastermind in marketing their work :P, just look at the coverage they are getting from news channels

Zubin July 20, 2010

Good info bro.. For now lets start using the font!

Anshul July 20, 2010

Thanks Zubin 🙂

Annonymus October 1, 2010

Rupee symbol is being included in Unicode 6.0 to be released on 11th October 2010. Government of India is also a member of Unicode Consortium. this new version will also have Brahmi script included from which all other Indic scripts have originated.