On including ruble symbol in UNICODE
The Unicode Consortium has included the ruble symbol approved by the Bank of Russia last December in the new version of the international standard UNICODE 7.0. The ruble symbol is placed in the currency symbols section under Unicode number U+20BD.
Now all the software products using UNICODE as the main source of character tables (and these products currently prevail worldwide) will be able to clearly identify the ruble symbol in all possible forms of visualization, including printers, computer monitors or tablet and smartphone screens.
December 2014 is to see a publication of the 4th edition of the International Standard ISO/IEC 10646 ‘Universal Character Set’ (UNICODE 7.0 analog), that will be applied on the territory of all 117 member-states of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).
Thereby the prerequisites are created for the emergence in the short-term outlook of a wide range of software and hardware products (operational systems, office packages, fonts, printers, keyboards, etc.) where the ruble symbol will be backed up by default, i.e. will be used in the initial factory settings.
The use of the ruble symbol by the media (especially the online-media) and the electronic commerce systems has recently seen a tangible growth. The ruble symbol is placed both before and after the denomination of the amount of money. Due to the lack of the historically established tradition, the Bank of Russia considers both variants of the ruble symbol placement to be acceptable.
Joint efforts of specialists of the Bank of Russia and the National Technical Committee for Standardisation TC22 ‘Information Technologies’ contributed to the preparation and effective promotion of the application to include the ruble symbol in UNICODE.
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