The Euro symbol

[Hugh Senior]

The currency entity in ISO646 originally resolved to an international 
currency symbol. Since there was no such thing as an 'international 
currency' the symbol didn't actually mean anything to anyone, but it did 
avoid a war between the USA (Dollar), the Soviet Union (Rouble) and China 
(Yen). Britain (Pound) maintained a dignified silence, but probably chuckled 
a bit when no-one was watching. ISO8859-15 in 1999 was meant to replace this 
artificial symbol with the euro sign, with € as the entity, € as 
the html numeric equivalent, Alt.Gr.4 or Alt.0128 as keyboard shortcuts on 
Windows and Shift.Option.2 on a Mac. The ¤ entity is legacy from the 
8-bit ISO 8859-1 character set (Latin-1), mainly to apease countries who 
hadn't substituted their own currency symbols on top of the ficticious, but 
Politically Correct, international symbol. That's why ¤ still exists, 
but it is largely meaningless and has been depricated in favour of localised 
alternatives, namely ASCII 8364 for the Euro sign in this context.

The Rev engine supports a (relatively) small and certainly incomplete entity 
equivalence set. Although cumbersome, if you set the htmltext of fld 1 to 
"<p>€</p>" it *should* be cross platform as Rev does implement all 
numeric equivalents (I guess by devolving the task to the result of a system 
call) all the way to high-ASCII unicode equivalents, but Rev seems to use 
€ on Windows which, according to my table of ASCII equivalents, is an 
unused slot.

/H


> On Aug 4, 2008, at 4:24 PM, Martin Baxter wrote:
>
>> Devin Asay wrote:
>>
>>> 1. The html entity for the Euro symbol is "¤"
>>
>> I guess you are a mac user Devin? The html entity for the euro symbol
>> used in web pages is "€". "¤" may give you the euro symbol
>> on a mac, IIRC mac roman replaced its currency symbol with the euro
>> symbol some years back, but on Windows here I get the dear old
>> currency
>> symbol when I use "¤" and, in Revolution, "€" just
>> displays
>> unmodified, unfortunately.
>>
>>
>> Would be nice if € worked, I can't think of any reason why it
>> couldn't. I've used € or numtochar(128) on windows when needed.
>
> Wow, that's really curious, and disturbing. On my Mac, if I do
>
> set the htmlText of fld 1 to "€"
>
> I get, as you do, the string "€" in the field. And ¤ gives
> a Euro symbol on Mac, and the generic "circle atop an X" symbol on
> Windows. All along, I've just assumed that html entities were the same
> across platforms. I mean, isn't that the point?
>
> It looks like the only reliable way is to use unicode.
>
> Devin