ESP – Product Engineering – Platform and Software Products

Soon after the announcement was made, a couple of ways to use the Indian rupee symbol on the computer were published. Most of them were related to installing a new font which had the Indian rupee symbol, and the user could map any character on his keyboard to use it. However this approach requires everyone to install the font on their machines, else what appears as the Indian rupee symbol to someone might appear as a junk character to another. Clearly, this is not a practical solution. In order for computers, devices, applications etc to recognize the new Indian rupee symbol uniformly, it has to be available as part of the Unicode Standard. The Unicode Standard contains a list of all symbols which can be used as characters. The Unicode Standard specifies a numeric value (code point) and a name for each of its characters, which can be understood by computers and devices. Unicode characters are represented in one of three encoding forms: a 32-bit form (UTF-32), a 16-bit form (UTF-16), and an 8-bit form (UTF-8). The latest version of Unicode is 5.2.0 which was released on 1st Oct, 2009.

So how does a symbol make it into the Unicode standard? The governing body of the Unicode consortium makes periodic updates to the Unicode standard. Usually with each update, support for new symbols, languages etc is added. There is generally a time frame of 6-12 months for a new version of the Unicode standard to be released. So in order to get the Indian rupee symbol into the next version of the Unicode standard, it has to be first submitted to the Unicode consortium so that they can allot a code point to it in the Unicode standard. Accordingly, the Indian government has submitted an application to the Unicode consortium to include the Indian rupee symbol into the Unicode standard and assign the Unicode character U+0971 to it. As India is a member of the Unicode consortium, the inclusion itself shouldn't be a problem. But, as per the process followed by the Unicode consortium, this may take a while before it is included in the Unicode standard. The symbol will be universally usable after it gets included in the Unicode standard, the ISO/IEC 10646 standard for coding multilingual text, and the Indian IS 13194 standard.

The Unicode consortium website does not mention the release date of the next version of Unicode. The encoding of the symbol in accordance with Indian standards is estimated to take about six months while encoding in the Unicode and ISO/IEC 10646 standards will take anywhere between 18 months to two years. So it may take some time for computers, devices and applications to provide support for this new symbol. Hardware vendors like HCL are already planning to include the Indian rupee symbol on their keyboards. Some cell phone vendors are contemplating whether to provide the Indian rupee symbol on the keypad or as a special symbol. However more than the hardware upgrade; a software upgrade will be required in order to support the Indian rupee symbol. Software patches will be released by numerous vendors to enable users to make use of this new symbol. Until then, people can enjoy installing fonts which support the Indian rupee symbol and get used to the idea of writing 100