Hi! <snip> > >I was taught at school that the double-bar form was used > when Australia > >switched to decimal currency in 1966, and that it was > incorrect to write > >the single-bar form when referring to Australian dollars. > > It would be interesting if you could document that.
That could be tough :) Literature shown to me was at school (many years ago), and digging it up would be difficult. It's widely known that the double-bar form does exist, though, at least! > >I guess the single-bar form had taken over due to the lack > of support from > >type-faces and computing devices, although it's still quite > common to see > >it in Australian publications, especially in large fonts (headlines, > >advertising, etc). > > It looks like actual practice is what you describe: the free > alternation > between the form without change in meaning. > > If we were to add a code point we would get into the > situation that the > free alternation would suddenly become a matter of content > difference (not > just a choice in presentation). In other cases where the > majority of users > freely alternate, but there is indication that some subset of > users need to > maintain a form distinction we have used standardized > variants. This has > been done mostly for mathematical symbols. <snip> I understand, although couldn't that same argument be used against many of the characters in the 'Dingbats' section, such as the ornamental variations of exclamation marks, quotation marks, and so forth? I do realise these come from an existing character set, but there are indeed still users of the double-bar form. Even my Concise Oxford Dictionary is printed using the double-bar form (under the term, 'dollar'). I just thought it extremely odd that a character which is still in common (albeit admittedly waning) use is not included in the set. Peter Kirk made a valid observation with regards to the Lira symbol (U+20A4) which Unicode admits often has U+00A3 (Pound sign) used in its place, with the only difference being a double-bar on U+20A4. Cheers, - Simon