Typophile - Currency Slot - Comments

pablohoney77 — Wed, 28 Apr 2004 15:44:38 -0700

sorry thom, i musta slipped into my pseudo-respectful mode. good to know i'm allowed to be on familiar terms with ya. ;^D

Thomas Phinney — Tue, 27 Apr 2004 20:21:42 -0700

Paul, you're right about the specified purpose of the currency sign. Mind you, I think it gets used more as a bullet or dingbat than in this intended manner.

But what's with this Mr. Phinney business? As long as you don't mind me calling you Paul, you can call me Thomas or Tom or T.

Cheers,

T

pablohoney77 — Tue, 27 Apr 2004 17:25:48 -0700

if i remember my reading of Elements correctly, the currency sign is used as a place holder for where a (unspecified) currency symbol should go. So though my opinion doesn't pull as much weight as Mr. Phinney's, i'd have to say that putting the Euro symbol in the currency slot would be a bad thing.

Thomas Phinney — Mon, 26 Apr 2004 13:02:46 -0700

What Juhani says about non-Unicode-savvy OSes and applications is not true. All the Windows codepages for European languages have both euro and currency characters in separate slots (Western/WinANSI, Eastern European, Cyrillic, Baltic, Turkish, Greek). Microsoft extended their codepages to add the euro many years ago. These codepages are what single-byte fonts and applications work with.

Although the currency symbol has few practical uses as a currency symbol, a lot of folks have ended up using it as a bullet or other kind of dingbat. Switching fonts and having it turn into a euro symbol would be a Bad Thing, and I have heard Windows users complain about it in fonts made by people who didn't know better.

There is no reason whatsoever to put a euro (U+20AC) symbol in the currency (U+00A4) slot in an OpenType CFF font. For Classic and OS 8/9, the ATM driver maps the euro to the right slot in MacRoman for both viewing and printing.

But there are good reasons NOT to double-map the euro symbol, as described above. So, for anybody asking for advice, I strongly discourage it, just as I would strongly discourage putting a euro in the slot intended for the letter E.

Regards,

T

eolson — Mon, 26 Apr 2004 12:53:17 -0700

Cool, thanks guys.

juhani_l — Mon, 26 Apr 2004 12:09:18 -0700

>Eric, don't worry, OT fonts (as other fonts based on TrueType table structure) have room for 65536 glyphs. It's enough for all currencies, which Unicode knows. I'm not sure, whether anybody needs the original currency sign for some purpose. Most Non-Unicode-savvy OS'ies and applications can't handle both currency (00A4) and Euro (20AC) sign in the same time, because they excist in (practically) no single 8-bit character set. A good rule of thumb: when dealing with OT fonts forget old apps and OS'ies. In practice you may put Euro sign in both slots, nobody will hardly complain.

Thomas Phinney — Mon, 26 Apr 2004 12:02:53 -0700

Oh, well that's easy, then. No reason whatsoever to put the euro in the currency slot. Each gets its own slot, and the euro will show up in the right place for MacRoman, including on Classic and OS 8/9.

But you need to have both for Windows and full Unicode environments. WinANSI has separate slots for the two, and Windows users and folks in full Unicode environments will think there's something wrong if a euro shows up in place of the generic currency symbol.

T

eolson — Mon, 26 Apr 2004 11:24:29 -0700

I forgot the mention.
I'm developing OpenType CFF flavored fonts.

Thomas Phinney — Mon, 26 Apr 2004 10:17:54 -0700

What OS are you on, and what format of fonts are you building?

In MacRoman encoding, there's only one slot, and if you want to have both glyphs one has to be unencoded. In Unicode or Windows based encodings, put each in its proper place.

If you need to worry about non Adobe Classic Mac apps, there are some extra wrinkles, which I've long since lost track of. I'm sure somebody else will chime in....

T

Currency Slot

eolson — Mon, 26 Apr 2004 08:51:29 -0700

I’m not sure when this originated but...
what is the status of including the Euro in the currency slot?
I’ve been including the Euro in both the currency and Euro slot.
From what I can tell, this is residue from my Fontographer days
when the Euro was new.