The Euro symbol

[Devin Asay]

Thanks for the historical background, Hugh.

On Aug 5, 2008, at 11:50 AM, Hugh Senior wrote:

> 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.

I had tried that earlier, but it doesn't work for me on my Intel Mac  
with 10.5.4. When I embed € into an html string and set the  
htmlText of a field to it, I get an upper-case "T". That surprised me,  
because using unicode escapes in htmltext has generally been very  
reliable for me in producing the desired unicode glyphs. The only  
consistent, reliable method I've found for producing the Euro symbol  
cross platform is using UTF-8 encoding:

   set the unicodeText of fld 1 to uniencode("€","utf8")

Regards,

Devin

Devin Asay
Humanities Technology and Research Support Center
Brigham Young University