Every character has a story #39: U+20ba, aka TURKISH LIRA SIGN (coming soon to Turkey near you!)

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2012/05/09 07:01 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2012/05/09/10302596.aspx


Tuesday May 8th, 2012 was yesterday.

For many, it was just another day.

Some births, some deaths. Some weddings. Maybe even some divorces.

Just like any other day.

But for another group, it was a really big day.

A day that might hole up in some small way to those who came in, those who went out, those who came together, those who went apart.

Because it was yesterday that the Unicode Technical Committee approved

U+20BA, aka TURKISH LIRA SIGN, aka

for inclusion in Unicode 6.2.

In fact, it is the only character being added to Unicode 6.2.

In the words of colleague Peter Constable after the issue was discussed and approved by the UTC:

This version will be published before the next meeting of the ISO committee that maintains ISO 10646. There is no concern that ISO would not approve the character for encoding or want to assign a different code point. Hence this code point can be assumed to stable as of now and can be used in implementations.

Cool. Pretty exciting, right?

This is the concrete step that puts the character first described here in Not the Lira or the New Lira, but a New Turkish Lira, nevertheless on the road to ending up in Windows, likely in time for the next version (and if the "Rupee Rumba" I first described in Rupee! Rupee! Let down your CHAR! is any indication, then some prior versions will see some support too -- Vista, Server 2008, Windows 7, Server 2008 R2).

Exact plans and schedule TBD for now.

I'll tell more when I know more about the future and such.

But in any case, it was not just another day, by any means!


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referenced by

2012/09/27 Announcing The Unicode Standard, Version 6.2 (and a little about what MS is doing about it)

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