by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2012/05/30 07:01 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2012/05/30/10311665.aspx
Doug Ewell commented in response to The relationship between the 'United States - International' keyboard layout and the Euro....:
And now, on The Unicode List™, we have someone wanting to know the position where INDIAN RUPEE SIGN will be added to the "U.S. English" keyboard. I don't know if he meant specifically Microsoft's, but maybe. The guy is located in Pune. It shows that despite their names, and despite the presence of local keyboards, the "U.S." keyboard layouts are in worldwide use.
The short answer, unsurprisingly enough to some, is:
Essentially never.
Precisely never.
Perhaps expanding it to the long answer would be prudent at this juncture!
When the rupee was added to Windows, a new en-IN type keyboard was added as well.
It takes kbdus.dll, and adds INDIAN RUPEE SIGN to ALTGR+4.
The United States - International keyboard already has something assigned there:
¤
aka U+00a4, aka CURRENCY SIGN.
And we don't change keyboard layout assignments.
Also, SHIFT + ALTGR + 4 is taken. By
£
aka U+00a3,aka POUND SIGN.
Note that ALTGR+R is also taken there -- it is
®
aka U+00ae, aka REGISTERED SIGN.
But by that time, you've left the land of the even theoretically intuitive....
Now we did consider adding it to kbdus.dll, but that idea was rejected -- since adding ALTGR+4 to kbdus.dll would disable the lone "RIGHT ALT" key, causing it to send CTRL+ALT when it was typed in.
Doing that everywhere in the world for the sake of any one country's currency symbol was just deemed a bad idea -- that's where that en-IN keyboard idea came from, the meeting where we realized kbdus.dll was out of bounds....
Joshua on 30 May 2012 1:17 PM:
Well since US-Internaltional already has ALTGR-Shift, you could bind to ALTGR-Shift-5 for Rupee (ALTGR-5 is Euro but you know that).
Michael S. Kaplan on 30 May 2012 10:07 PM:
Not very intuitive!