| ¤ | |
|---|---|
Currency sign | |
| In Unicode | U+00A4 ¤CURRENCY SIGN (¤) |
 Category | |
Thecurrency sign¤ is acharacter used to denote an unspecifiedcurrency. It can be described as a circle the size of a lowercase character with four short radiating arms at 45° (northeast), 135° (southeast), 225° (southwest) and 315° (northwest). It is raised slightly above thebaseline. The character is sometimes calledscarab.[1]: 5
The symbol was first encoded for computers in 1972, as a placeholder for national currency symbols such as thedollar sign, innational variants (ISO 646) ofASCII and the International Reference Variant.[2] It was proposed by Italy[3] as an alternative (to the dollar sign) at 0x24[clarification needed]. In reality, most national standards retained the dollar sign as too important.[1]: 6 ASCII and ISO 646 were specified as 7-bit encoding, which allowed for 96 printable characters and 32 control codes. The character is used in theGSM default 7-bit encoding as specified in 3GPP TS 23.038 / GSM 03.38 at 0x24.
The introduction of 8-bit encoding and theISO/IEC 8859code pages meant that all major national currency symbols (in use at the time) could be accommodated. WhenISO 8859 was standardized, this symbol was placed atcode point 0xA4 in the Latin, Arabic, and Hebrew character sets. TheCyrillic set included it in early drafts, but it was removed in the published version in favour of including thesection sign,§,[a] and it was not included in all later added Latin sets. In Soviet computer systems (usually using some variant ofKOI character set) this symbol was placed at the code point used by the dollar sign in ASCII.ISO Latin 9 reallocated the code point used for this symbol to theeuro sign,€, but this standard failed to gain significant acceptance given the dominance at the time of Microsoft'sWindows-1252 code page. In the modern era, theUnicode standard gives each of the major currency symbols – and this one – its own unique and device-independent code point, with implementation (or lack of) left to font designers.
The symbol is used as a non-printing "end of cell" marker for tables inMicrosoft Word.[6]
The symbol may be seen in technical documentation, such as those for programming languages (e.g., Java'sDecimalFormat), to represent any arbitrary currency. This invites the reader to (mentally) substitute their local symbol when reading.
It is represented inUnicode asU+00A4 ¤CURRENCY SIGN (¤)
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
\textcurrency inLaTeX.The currency sign was once a part of theMac OS Roman character set, butApple changed the symbol at that code point to the euro sign inMac OS 8.5. In pre-UnicodeWindows 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.
