The uniqueness of the ¤ symbol

Cory Maylett

The currency symbol ( ¤ ) puzzles me. I understand its use as a generic symbol for money, but does anyone here know why, unlike other currency symbols, it is smaller than cap height and positioned above the baseline? I've dutifully included it in every font I've designed but have never understood the origins of its uniqueness.

Yves Michel

Wikipedia: Generic placeholder for any actual symbol, for example in formatting pattern "12¤00"

Yves Michel

French Wikipedia: Un signe fut alors (1999) prévu pour désigner un symbole monétaire générique lorsque le symbole national n’existe pas dans le jeu de caractères, le symbole : ¤.

John Hudson

This character is a legacy throwback to various kinds of more-or-less manual typesetting in which it was fairly common for fonts not to include a wide variety of currency symbols, so this symbol would be inserted as a placeholder during typesetting, and then later replaced with the appropriate currency symbol sources from another font or from a special set of currency sorts.

The form of the placeholder is arbitrary, and I don’t know where it originated. I think it is deliberately dissimilar to the proportions and alignment of actual currency symbols to make it stand out. You wouldn’t want a placeholder to be easily missed in proofreading.

Cory Maylett

Thank you, John and Yves. I don't recall ever seeing the ¤ used here in the US. Google searches told me it was a placeholder for standard currency symbols, but why an awkwardly sized and misaligned currency placeholder was needed was puzzling.

The explanation about an obviously different placeholder character's role in legacy typesetting, where fonts didn't necessarily have all the needed characters for the job, makes sense.

Andreas Stötzner

¤ is a zombie character. It has no real meaning and it has never been used anywhere.

Mark Simonson

When Henk Gianotten interviewed me in 2009 for the Dutch magazine Publish, he criticized the ¤ in Proxima Nova as being unacceptable.

Assuming that it was rarely if ever used, I had made it identical in weight and design for all styles. (I used to do this for other symbols like © and ® as well.)

He told me that it was indeed used in the financial sector (although I don't recall the details) and that the way I'd designed it would lead to Proxima Nova being rejected by those users. 

Since then I've always designed it to match the weight and style of the font, taking him at his word that some people did use it. FWIW, except for Henk, no one else ever complained about it.

Johannes Neumeier

It would be curious to find any reference to the symbol pre ISO 646 — was it invented for this purpose, or did some kind of symbol like this exist before?

Igor Freiberger

I simply place it in the middle height of numbers. And I saw it used once in a list of exchange rates. Countries without a national symbol or no symbol in the font were represented by the generic symbol.

John Hudson

@Johannes Neumeier The use of the sign as a generic currency placeholder certainly originated in ISO 646, where in localised versions of that standard it could replace the decimal codepoint otherwise used for the dollar sign. I’ve not determined whether the shape of the sign was invented at the same time, or derived from some pre-existing graphic.

Jens Kutilek

John Hudson said:

The form of the placeholder is arbitrary, and I don’t know where it originated.

I once heard that it is meant to represent a coin glinting in the sun, but a quick search could neither confirm nor deny this theory.

Mark Simonson

It appears in Henry Dreyfuss' Symbol Sourcebook (1955) as "Street Light, Underground Circuit" in the architectural symbols section. Probably unrelated to its later use.