Regarding the new Saudi riyal currency symbol

Peter Constable
Peter Constable Posts: 227
in Technique and Theory
Many people have noted that the Saudi Arabic Central Bank recently launched a new symbol to represent the Saudi riyal currency. Naturally, people want to start using it right away, and that has led to discussion about redesigning glyphs for an existing Unicode character, U+FDFC RIAL SIGN.

The existing Unicode character U+FDFC RIAL SIGN is not the same character as the new Saudi riyal currency sign, and font vendors should not create fonts that map U+FDFC to the Saudi riyal sign (in any design adaptations). There are several reasons why these characters cannot be confused, not the least of which is that U+FDFC is used to represent the Iranian rial. A new character for the Saudi riyal sign will be encoded in the next version of Unicode; the code point and character name will be included in the Unicode 17.0 Beta which will be available for public review in early May. 

Comments

  • Peter Constable
    Peter Constable Posts: 227
    For more info as to why U+FDFC cannot be used for the new Saudi riyal currency sign, see the following document prepared by the working group under the Unicode Technical Committee that reviews encoding proposals:

    SEW recommendation on encoding the SAUDI RIYAL SIGN
  • Thomas Phinney
    Thomas Phinney Posts: 2,954
    Oh! Aside from the design differences concerns, which I would not minimize, I would not have guessed that there are different (1) decompositions and (2) bidi properties for the two characters. Those are a big deal. The right-to-left part in particular could cause some very unexpected behaviors with numerals in an otherwise right-to-left context!

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