Regarding the new Saudi riyal currency symbol

Peter Constable
Peter Constable Posts: 229
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: 229
    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: 2,955
    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!
  • Nadine Chahine
    Nadine Chahine Posts: 109
    Peter Constable said:
    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. 
    Perfect and thank you for the info! When will we be able to use the new unicode value? Early May or do we need to wait till it's fully adopted?
  • Peter Constable
    Peter Constable Posts: 229
    A Unicode blog about the riyal was posted late last week with some general guidance about implementations and timelines:

    The Unicode Blog: Support for the New Saudi Riyal Currency Symbol

    Nadine Chahine said:
    Perfect and thank you for the info! When will we be able to use the new unicode value? Early May or do we need to wait till it's fully adopted?
    As stated in the above blog, a code point will be documented in the beta that's released in May, and implementers could start developing with that, but there is a risk (albeit small) of changes during the beta review, and so it's recommended that product updates using the new code point not be released until Unicode 17.0 has been finalized and released in September.
  • Nadine Chahine
    Nadine Chahine Posts: 109
    Thanks! This is what I was wondering, especially for large clients with a big distribution. Better to be safe and wait till September then. Thank you Peter!

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