Currency sign (generic)
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Currency sign | |
In Unicode | U+00A4 ¤ CURRENCY SIGN (¤) |
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The currency sign ¤ is a character used to denote an unspecified currency. It can be described as a circle the size of a lowercase character with four short radiating arms at 45° (NE), 135° (SE), 225° (SW) and 315° (NW). It is raised slightly above the baseline. The character is sometimes called scarab.[1]: 5
History
The symbol was first encoded for computers in 1972, as a placeholder for national currency symbols such as the
The introduction of 8-bit encoding and the
Other uses
The symbol is used as a non-printing "end of cell" marker for tables in Microsoft Word.[6]
Unicode
It is represented in Unicode as U+00A4 ¤ CURRENCY SIGN (¤)
Keyboard entry
The symbol is available on some keyboard layouts, for example, French, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, Estonian, Slovak and Hungarian.[7]
Otherwise, it may be typed
- in Windows using Alt+0164
- US internationalsetting in Windows: AltGr+4 (with this setting, the right-hand Alt key acts as an AltGr key)
- In Linux as Composeox
- In Linux and ChromeOS using Ctrl+⇧ Shift+u A4space
- In ChromeOS (if using US international keyboard setting) right alt+4
- Using
\textcurrency
in LaTeX.
OS-specific
The currency sign was once a part of the Mac OS Roman character set, but Apple changed the symbol at that code point to the euro sign in Mac OS 8.5. In pre-Unicode Windows character sets (Windows-1252), the generic currency sign was retained at 0xA4 and the euro sign was introduced as a new code point, at 0x80 in the little used (by Microsoft) control-code space 0x80 to 0x9F.
See also
- XXX (currency)(ISO 4217 code for no specific currency)
- Square lozenge(⌑)
Explanatory footnotes
- KOI8-E) of ECMA-113 have very different layouts, their repertoires are very similar, differing only in that the 1986 edition has a universal currency sign and the 1988 edition has a section sign.
References
- ^ Bemer, Robert William(July 1978). "Inside ASCII - Part III". Interface Age. 3 (7). Portland, OR, USA: dilithium Press: 80–87.
- ^ "ISO 646 (Good old ASCII)". czyborra.com. Retrieved 2016-04-13.
- ^ "Character histories - notes on some Ascii code positions". jkorpela.fi.
- European Computer Manufacturers Association(ECMA). 1988-06-30.
- European Computer Manufacturers Association(ECMA). 1986-06-26.
- ^ Suzanne S. Barnhill. "Word's non-printing formatting marks: cell markers". ssbarnhill.com.
- ^ "IBM Globalization – Keyboard layouts". ibm.com. 2013-11-11. Archived from the original on July 3, 2018. Retrieved 2016-04-13.