Greek ₯ drachma symbol

Kent Lew

Setting aside issues of present or past political and economic vicissitudes [hopefully], does anyone have any concrete information about the formation of the drachma monetary symbol (₯)?

Given that it is primarily historical at this point, does anyone have any historical examples they could share? All the usual suspects I can find online — postage stamps and currency — seem to have the currency either spelled out or simply abbreviated Δρ.

Was the script form ever widely used as an actual monetary symbol? Is the script-ness, especially in the Δ component, really an inherent quality of the symbol, per se?

If one is choosing to cover the legacy codepoint in a modern font, is the script form still critical to the glyph? Or could one just as well use a logographic form of Δρ (and thus conceivably have upright and italic variants)?

George Thomas

SIL uses the script form, and I tend to follow what they do.

Kent Lew

I just wonder if type designers following each other aren’t just perpetuating a folly.

FWIW, I just stumbled across this document from Michael Everson to the Unicode Consortium also questioning the script form given as the Unicode chart example:

http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2010/10253-n3866-drachma.pdf

in which he states, “There is no evidence at all that the glyph currently used in the code charts has ever been used in Greece for any purpose.”

This seems to address some of my questions, anyway.

Jeff Kellem

The IBM 1403 mainframe line printer (sold from 1959–1983) had the delta in the upper left + a rho in the lower right in at least one print chain slug. I used this style in the 1403 Vintage Mono Pro typeface.

Igor Freiberger

Good question, Kent.

I disagree from Everson's proposal. The stacked ∆ρ sample he gave is the very only I found on the web. Stamps seem to offer the more consistent clue. In older ones, the abbreviation was ∆ρ for one Drachma and ∆ραχ for plural. Later, ∆ρχ was used for plural. And in more recent times (maybe from 60's) ∆ρ begun to be universal (a simple search can be seen here).

It would be interesting to find the original proposal to include Drachma sign into Unicode. At least some reason should exist to the design actually adopted by the standard, even if it is not fully correct. 

Kent Lew

Igor — The original proposal for encoding is here:

http://www.unicode.org/L2/L1999/n1946.pdf

In the document of my first link, Everson references it (he submitted it). He says that he made the glyph presented in the original document based on an image from ELOT. And then, he later questioned the source and wisdom of that shape.

Personally, I would lean toward a simple logographic Δρ (not stacked). But it’s certainly not my place to tell the Greeks what they should use (should they resume using it).

Denis Moyogo Jacquerye

This is one of those DOA currency symbols that ended up in Unicode but has never really been used. The only demonstrated use of this character is to illustrate a failed symbol.

Thomas Phinney

Reminds me of the ECU in that regard.