Turkey: a new symbol for the lira

[Nick Shinn]

Hey, it’s more fun than Rolfing.

[evertype]

http://www.evertype.com/standards/iso10646/pdf/n4258-lira.pdf

[kot1]

nhng

[Andreas Stötzner]

Thanks for posting Michael.
Now we can prepare for the worst …

[Si_Daniels]

Looks like the code point is considered stable if this blog post can be believed... http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2012/05/09/10302596.aspx

[hrant]

Good news.

BTW, this just hit me:
http://t2.ftcdn.net/jpg/00/13/27/09/400_F_13270979_ValS8Lgtbm7j22B6RwT8F...
:-)

hhp

[dezcom]

Hrant, did you steal my bedroom slippers?
;-)

[Si_Daniels]

Unicode announcement - http://unicode-inc.blogspot.com/2012/05/unicode-62-to-support-turkish-li...

[John Hudson]

My first:

Slanted cross bars are part of the spec -- apparently symbolising the rising prestige of the Turkish currency --, but I'm hoping that over time it will become acceptable for them to be horizontal. Hinting two shallow diagonals to remain parallel is a pain.

[hrant]

I'm hoping that over time it will become acceptable for them to be horizontal.

Why not increase the chances of that by making yours that way? People follow the pioneers. On the other hand I can see how a non-native might more easily be accused of inauthenticity when trying to innovate.

hhp

[John Hudson]

At this point, I'm more concerned about the client coming back and asking me to redraw it if I were to make the bars horizontal. When there isn't much established practice, quality assurance testers are liable to rely on official descriptions and reference images.

[Bendy]

Nice to see how the sign could start to evolve. Here's my take:

A bit narrow perhaps.

[hrant]

John, maybe take that small risk for the sake of what you feel the symbol should look like? It's now or never.

BTW, I'm starting to wonder whether the tilting was intended as a distancing from the Euro.

Ben: Seems like a further allusion to Arabic - nice.

hhp

[John Hudson]

It's not a 'small risk', Hrant. Designing and hinting sixteen Turkish Lira glyphs (four per font in lining, oldstyle, tabular and proportional variants) took four man-hours. I'm not willing to risk having to re-do that work just to make a point. I have much, much better things to do with my time.

[Andreas Stötzner]

This is becoming the mess I have expected.
By now I don’t even know if the new “char” thingie gets approval by the ISO working group. Unicode – becoming a stage for promoting poor propaganda design pieces? How low can we get.

John, well done, but to me that is still but a glyph variant of 20A4. It is anything but your fault, it’s just the inherent conundrum.
(I repeat myself I’m afraid.)

I shall just double the 20A4 glyph into the new slot and be done with it. Will anybody come up to complain?

My only hopes now lay with the average Anatolian market folks. Wether they make something reasonable out of it on their blackboards by time, or my vision of the matter will remain dark.
_ _ _ _ _

And now we’d rather spend our wits on re-briefing the design of 20AF. Will be needed quite soon, I fear.

[quadibloc]

I've just come across a news item announcing that the next release of Unicode has been hastened, due to the urgent need to support the new Turkish lira sign:

http://unicode-inc.blogspot.ca/2012/05/unicode-62-to-support-turkish-lira-sign.html

Maybe I clicked on the link to it earlier in this thread, in which case this didn't need to be posted,

(EDIT: It was: Si Daniels' post above.)

or perhaps it came up in a Google search I conducted for other reasons, in which case this might be useful news.

So its code point will be U+20B4, and we can all stop waiting.

EDIT: So now the comments can start about how such a thing can be called "urgent". But despite what opinion one might have about Turkey's adoption of a distinctive symbol for their currency, the fact is that once it has been adopted, Turkish computer users, at least, will want to be able to generate it from their keyboards as easily as U.S. computer users produce the dollar sign "$", and without a standardized Unicode code point, chaos and inconvenience will result from attempts to satisfy that desire.

Turkey should have been able to just reserve a codepoint before even picking the appearance of the new glyph, in my opinion, so that the moment the winner was announced, standardized implementations could be rolled out without waiting an extra second.

[John Hudson]

So its code point will be U+20B4.

NO IT WON'T.

Sorry to shout, but stating incorrect code values for newly encoded characters is not helpful. The approved codepoint is U+20BA.

Repeat: U+20BA

[John Hudson]

Andreas: but to me that is still but a glyph variant of 20A4

Well, no, it isn't. A glyph variant of U+20A4 is a sign whose underlying encoding is U+20A4. But the Turkish Lira symbol is approved for encoding as U+20BA, and that is the only correct, standard encoding for this sign. Your opinion has nothing to do with this, any more than mine does: it is a matter of text encoding standard.

[hrant]

Maybe somebody wrote down an "A" but it looked like a "4"?
The evils of handwriting, I tell you! ;-)

hhp

[Riccardo Sartori]

Maybe somebody wrote down an "A" but it looked like a "4"?
The evils of handwriting

Or of 1337 speak… ;-)

[hrant]

Mess? I'm personally seeing the normal birthing pains of a new character; as it matures it will have to decide (via our proxy) what glyphs it can be. And I feel lucky to be in the right place at the right time to witness the thick of it. Sadly I missed the Armenian Dram's formative period (although I think I'm OK with the adult it's become).

Will anybody come up to complain?

Well, if John's concern about the inclination of the bars is valid (and I agree that it very well might be) then I would say many Turks will find your proposition offensive (even though you didn't intend it as such). Nationalism permeates everything (even if many Westerners think they're impervious). That said, there's always room for an individual to make a statement, even via a minor glyph in the font he makes; I make a statement with my «հ» every time... although Sylfaen just obstructed it for most people. :-)

Also: Fonts being more formal and prestigious, I don't think how people handwrite the Turkish Lira (which is easy enough to write that I don't expect any structure-changing facilitation) will have much of an effect. The people in a position to strongly affect the evolution are the ones choosing the fonts we make (partly based on how our 20BA* looks).

* See below.

hhp

[David Rault]

Well, what can I say. When I discovered the sign, I was unaware of the change, and I saw it first on an advertisement for a computer. I was a bit disturbed for a little while, and I got quite accustomed to it. It's actually in line with other signs of the world (yen, euro, etc), and it's very easy to reproduce by hand (a VERY important issue).

David

[Té Rowan]

Still looks too much like a scythe to me.

[hrant]

What's wrong with a scythe? I own a scythe.

hhp

[dezcom]

Hrant, you own a scythe because you are a cut above the rest ;-)