Wednesday, May 16, 2012

Turkish Lira is supported in #Unicode

When #Turkey selected a new symbol for its currency, the Lira, it had to make sure that people can actually use it. Given that almost all modern computing is done with Unicode fonts, it was important to have the symbol included as soon as possible in Unicode.

The Turkish Lira will be supported in the Unicode 6.2 release that was just announced for the third quarter of 2012. The next step is to have the symbol included in fonts. A font that includes the new symbol can already be found on the website of the Turkish central bank.

In a previous Unicode release the Indian Rupee was introduced. The question is very much to what extend and at what pace people will have updated fonts that includes such symbols. The Wikipedia article on the Indian Rupee uses an image.

It is possible to create a font that includes characters like these currency symbols and make use of the WebFonts extension. In many ways it is more elegant than using graphics.
Thanks,
      GerardM

1 comment:

Michael Everson said...

Rupakara, a free font designed originally to support the INDIAN RUPEE SIGN, has now been updated to add support for the TURKISH LIRA SIGN. See http://www.evertype.com/fonts/rupakara/