Suggestion: Addition of the Rupee symbol glyph with other currency symbols

Glyphs
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Hello! I’m liking Glyphs a lot having recently bought the software. I also like the whole community around it, and appreciate all the help I have received through the forum.

It would be great to have the Rupee symbol as one of the defaults in the currency category along with dollar, euro, yen, etc. There’s a huge population in India who is having to rely on custom rupee symbol fonts (including me) because majority of the fonts don’t include it. I feel that if it’s not included in the symbols as a default it might not be added by the designers who may not be aware that there is such a symbol as it’s relatively new. Of course, it’s up to the designers to add it to their fonts.

Please take this as a friendly suggestion! I absolutely love Glyphs nevertheless. Thanks!

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For most scripts the symbols (currency and such) are in the sidebar under that language. I added the rupee to the Devanagari section. What other languages should get it, too?

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Well, Latin would be good since the Rupee symbol can be used with any language or script just like the dollar, euro or yen symbol. Don’t think it needs to be limited to Devanagari since almost all business communication happens in English in India.

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We’ll think about this. Thanks for the suggestion.

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Great, thanks.

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First off: the main idea of the sidebar is to filter, not necessarily to list. Nothing keeps you from adding all the currency signs you want, but you will make a choice for your font. We do list some symbols there we regard as the bare minimum. Ask yourself: ‘imagine you do not care about or want currency symbols at all in your font, but which ones will you still have to do anyway?’ It breaks down to:

  1. Is it technically necessary? Will the font have technical problems if the sign is not included?
  2. Can it be typed? I.e., is it included on many keyboard layouts? This is mainly to avoid fallback font triggering in Office apps.
  3. Is it in frequent use? Perhaps even beyond its use as currency symbol proper?
  4. Counter indication: Is it attached to certain scripts? I.e., would you only sensibly include it if you also support a certain script, or set of scripts? Then it would make more sense to do the listing in those scripts.

For rupee, I see:

  1. Certainly not.
  2. On the Mac, the keyboards associated with India include it on Opt-4, e.g. the Latin ‘ABC India’ keyboard, and all the layouts for Indic scripts. On Windows, there is an Indian English Windows keyboard that is mentioned online, but I am not sure if it is in widespread use. I have the suspicion that the rupee sign remains pretty inaccessible on Windows, because I found a healthy number of explanations for typing the Windows Alt code.
  3. From a first survey, it appears to be in use inside India, but hardly outside. I am still not sure if it makes sense to include it in a font that does not specifically target the Indian market. Would you include it in the font for, say, a Hungarian newspaper? Probably not, as opposed to the ones that are currently listed.
  4. Not sure. Evidence of (2) suggests it may be expected in a Latin-only font as well.

So, I am leaning towards inclusion of the rupee sign, but I am basing this mainly on the Indian English Mac keyboard.

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Going to add to @mekkablue point no. 4 that since the ₹ symbol is an Indian currency symbol thats authorised by the government, it can be used along with any scripts in India. Including it with Devnagri filter suggests THAT is the only Indian script it can be used with.

Secondly, as @manfromthere already said, its used with Latin which has a fair readership within the country (Possibly larger than the Hungarian population :smiley: ). Additionally its not uncommon to see Indo-arabic (1234) numerals used in Indian scripts inspite of there being numerals native to those scripts. This kind of mixed usage can then benefit from having the Rupee symbol rather than having to type INR or Rupees spelt out phonetically in that script.

So I’d be happy to see ₹ in the currency defaults too, the other option being that it be added to every script in the Indic filter?

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Thanks for the insightful comments @mekkablue and @TanyaGeorge. :smiley:

To start off, the reason why I wanted it to be alongside dollar, euro, yen, etc. is to encourage designers to include it in their fonts. As @TanyaGeorge pointed out, it’s actually rare to see numerals that aren’t Indo-arabic in India, so overall it would be great to see people not fallback on Rs or INR or designers using a PNG image of the Rupee symbol. A lot of people from my generation can hardly read numerals that are written in Devanagari or their native scripts just because they aren’t used as widely.

The Yen symbol might not be required in India or Hungary as often as Euro or Dollar symbols are - however it’s still a part of the “currency” symbols category. Another reason I felt that the Rupee symbol should be a part of that list is because the category “currency” indicates it includes all currency symbols present (at least that’s how I interpreted it).

Agreed, it’s hard to get it on keyboard especially the Windows ones. Not sure what the reason there is. Maybe because India was late to the currency symbol game, majority of the widely used fonts don’t have it. Maybe adding it as permanent fixture in Indian keyboard might be the solution.

A thought - maybe it’s worth adding it to the “currency” category just because it’s new and it would be helpful to have that symbol in as many fonts that are created just so that it’s at least discoverable by designers who might not necessarily be creating Devanagari fonts. That filtering is also problematic since adding it to Devanagari or Indic scripts might falsely indicate to designers that it cannot be used with Latin - which as we know is how it’s used widely in India.

:smile:

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I’m in favor of the rupee being in the default list. It’s the currency of the second most populous country, over 1.3 billion people. And with English being the lingua franca of India use of the rupee is only going to grow. Use outside of India will grow in business news services as India becomes an important exporter/importer. So the rupee might not be in great use today, it will be in the future, so it’s best to start implementing it now.

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OK, let me answer some issues, then digress a bit and outline the reasoning behind the default listing. I am preemptively sorry for the unusually long post.

rupeeIndian in the Languages entries for the Southeast Asian scripts: I had thought that was already the case, but apparently we are adding them now. That was what Georg’s question (further above) was about.

Why? A symbol can be (and in fact, many are) listed in multiple places. One good question I see is: does it make sense to add it in the Category > Symbol list, so we do not need to add it everywhere.

That is what it already does. It is primarily a filter. If a currency symbol is in the font, it will be listed there.

Two misunderstandings here. First, rupeeIndian already IS part of the currency category, like all the other approx 60 currency symbols we have in the glyph info at the moment.

And secondly, you actually cannot get around yen. That is because yen is part of both Win1252 and MacRoman. Not supporting yen breaks the font in Office software and with almost any keyboard out there. That includes the Hungarian and the ABC India keyboard layouts, so it is required.

IOW it is listed there, so we do not need to repeat it in all the collections, like we list the comma and the colon there, because it is essential for pretty much any keyboard layout out there.

Please understand: this is a weak argument. Because there is nothing that keeps designers from including it in their fonts now already. I accept that what you want to do is a noble endeavour, but that is not the point of the category list.

The real question is: is it necessary to ‘force’ it on all type designers? What is the actual problem if it is missing in fonts? We need to have a very good excuse, and it is clear that ‘we want to encourage you’ really doesn’t cut it. I would actually love to remove things like lozenge from the listings, but we cannot because a font lacking them will break.

So, the strongest argument for listing it by default is its typeability on a range of keyboards: Gujarati, Kannada, Konkani, the Devanagari keyboards, etc. The chance of someone typing it and triggering a fallback font (or notdef in DTP software) is too high.

The counterargument is that all of these keyboard layouts are specifically Indian. So it may be a better option to add it to all Southeast Asian entries in the Languages section.

The counterargument to the counterargument would be that rupeeIndian is included on the Mac’s ABC India keyboard (Opt-4) and on Windows 10, you can type it with AltGr-4 on the English (India) keyboard. And, please correct me if I am wrong, I think it is not only plausible, but likely to do a Latin-only font for the Indian market. And a designer doing such a font would have no other way to see if all required bits and pieces are covered or not. The Southeast Asian listings would not help in this case.

Yet another option would be to add a Currency entry for the Languages section, much like we have Emoji and Math now. There it would make sense to strive for completeness, and categorise better. I would especially look forward to a ‘Legacy’ section, where we can park historic ballast like drachma, franc, germanpenny, etc. But that is another story.

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That sounds like a great idea. Currency symbols are not necessarily tied to scripts/languages; they are their own pool of symbols. Currency symbols are also often used when the user did not enter them on the keyboard, such as automatic formatting in a spreadsheet application.

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Also, please don’t add /florin to the currency section. It’s used in African languages and should therefore not assume a special form; instead it belongs with other letters like /f. Even Apple’s SF switched from having an italic /florin to an upright form which only contextually assues the form used in optics to describe the f-number:

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I’ve read several times, the /florin symbol is perhaps used in some former Dutch colonies, but there was no evidence of that. So I tried to find out if it’s true or not. And it is indeed used in the Caribbean, both in print and in handwriting. I did find photos of local menus, price tags on marketplace etc. So it still serves the currency symbol purpose, though for small nations.

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Good to know! Still, I would err on the side of having a normal f with a hook which is used as a currency symbol instead of having a special form f which is used as a letter.

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The code point serves multiple purposes, and a shape that does not adapt is acceptable as well. So you can have it for both purposes at the same time.

If you add florin (which is not a choice really, because it is on most Mac keyboard layouts), it is a good idea to add Fhook as well so it can casefold in InDesign’s World Ready Composer, where it is treated as the letter. In the classic Adobe Composer, it is considered the currency sign.

On the Mac, it has traditionally had a second function as abbreviation for the word “folder” in Finder folder names, especially when you need to differentiate it from a file with an otherwise equal name in the same location.

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Sorry for the delayed resply here. I love the idea of adding a Currency entry for the Languages section. I understand that there is a slight tension between “the chance for someone typing it and need for someone typing it” in our arguments. My arguments are of course biased as I am also speaking as a user of the fonts that don’t have the rupee symbol.

I also agree no one should be coerced into designing it. And just like those who want to design it will design it anyways, I could argue that those who don’t will skip it. The font will not be unusable in case of the latter. Additionally, including it in a font that does not support Indian scripts has benefits for the user of that font as the rupee symbol can be used in any language used to write about the Indian economy etc.