It is a measure of just how integral a part of our lives technology has become that when the new Indian Rupee symbol was first unveiled last month, the first concerns most people had about it was how to type it on a keyboard. Well, if you are fed up of memorising weird keyboard shortcuts and downloading font packages, you can just go right ahead and purchase the TVS Gold Bharat, India’s first keyboard with a key for the new Rupee symbol. The key, as can be seen in the picture, is located above the tab key. It works just dandy with both Linux and Windows. Now, we are waiting for the first notebook with a dedicated key for the new Rupee!
We seem to have forgotten the major issue: Storage, especially where a sensitive character such as the Rupee Sign to be used the world over and which can be misused for nefarious ends, is concerned.
First in is not always the winner and by placing the rupee sign on the grave accent, the developers have barred the rupee sign from appearing on international sites where the Rupee will show up as a grave accent. Have tested this by creating a website and sending it to a recipient who did not have the font and who saw only a grave accent.
This “grave” if you’ll excuse the pun.
Moreover Unicode will allot the rupee as a character in the currency range. This will mean two allotments to the same sign. The TVS software will have to provide a patch, matching the Rupee onto the allotted code-chart, which will make things even more complex involving updating legacy data.
This is extremely serious in Banking and finance arenas.
A little thought could have ensured that our rupee sign will shine on all web-sites.
We could have taken a leaf out of the Euro experience which allotted the Euro sign on the keyboard once Unicode allotted it a place in the Currency symbols. But I guess we’ll never learn.