New Rupee Symbol Now Unicode Standard

Within three months of the announcement of the new symbol for the Indian Rupee, it has been officially made a part of the Unicode Standard.

For widespread usage, the new Rupee symbol had to be accepted by the Unicode Consortium’s Unicode Technical Committee that is responsible for the development and maintenance of the Unicode Standard, including the Unicode Character Database.

The Unicode Consortium, on October 11, announced the newly finalised newly Unicode Version 6.0 that adds 2088 characters, with over 1000 new symbols, including that for the Indian Rupee.

“With the help of the Indian government and our colleagues in ISO, we were able to accelerate the encoding process.” said Mark Davis, president of the Consortium. “Once computers and mobile phones update to the new version of Unicode, people will be able to use the rupee sign like they use $ or € now.”

The official Unicode character code for the Indian Rupee symbol is U+20B9. The Indian Rupee symbol was designed by Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay postgraduate D Udaya Kumar.
The latest release of the Unicode Standard also includes support for the ancient Indian Brahmi script that was in use during the reign of Emperor Ashoka.

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