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The Euro has arrived
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On 1 January 2002, the Euro has become the official currency in The
Netherlands and most other European countries. As a new symbol has
been developed for the Euro, this raises problems on most computers,
operating systems and software.
For RISC OS users this means that a number of changes to the software
may be necessary. If you are using RISC OS 4 or later, the Euro symbol
will already be present in the fonts (typefaces) supplied with the OS.
These will generally be the Corpus, Homerton and Trinity fonts.
For users of older versions of RISC OS, the situation is slightly more
complex. Furthermore, most existing fonts will not contain the Euro symbol.
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Contents of this page
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If you want to buy new fonts from your RISC OS dealer, please check if these
fonts have the Euro symbol embedded. All new EFF and
iSV fonts are supplied with the Euro symbol at the correct position.
Please note that under RISC OS, the Euro symbol may appear at two positions.
One version is the font-specific variant (128) and the other one is the genuine
Euro symbol (164).
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Existing fonts will generally not have the Euro symbol embedded.
There are four possible solutions:
- Order new fonts (e.g. from EFF)
- Use a font-editor to manually add the symbol to each font
- Use a separate font containing the Euro symbol (e.g. Euro or Currency)
- Use a Draw-file variant of the Euro sumbol in your documents
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Euro font
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This font contains the Euro symbol in serveral weights, such as mono spaced,
sans serif and serif. The Euro symbol will be available at the positions of
the other currency symbols, such as the Dollar, Pound, Euro, Yen, etc.
All other positions are empty.
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Currency font
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This is a very special font, containig all known currency symbols under their
equivalent letter key. E.g. S will give Dollar, L will give Pound and
E will produce a Euro symbol.
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Euro draw
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This is a Draw file containg the Euro symbol as a drawing, making it suitable
for practically all RISC OS programs. This is the official Euro symbol, provided
by The Bank of The Netherlands and converted by us for RISC OS.
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You may, of course, add the Euro symbol to existing fonts yourself. Please not that,
when using the Euro sumbol in official documents, it has to comply to certain design
rules. The drawing on the left can be used as a guide when designing font-specific
variants of the Euro symbol.
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What is the official position of the Euro symbolin a font?
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Most standard fonts consist of 256 characters (letters and symbols).
This limitation is caused by the fact that the text in most files is stored in an
256) possibilities. This is often called the ASCII standard.
In the ASCII standard the position for all standard upper and lower case letters is fixed.
All positions between 28 and 127 are reserved for such characters. This will be the same
on most computers and operating systems. However, the situation is much more complicated
for special characters, such as ë, ç and ©. For these characters positions 128 to 255 are
used, but unfortunately most computers (and operating systems) have assigned these positions
differently. Apple uses its own standard, whilst Microsoft uses, of course, a completely
different 'standard'. RISC OS has conformed itself to the ISO Latin 1 standaard,
which is now commonly used on the Internet.
- 128, RISC OS, font-specific version of the Euro symbol (also used under Windows)
- 136, Euro symbol on some RISC OS fonts
- 164, RISC OS, font-independent version, was Currency sign (also used under MacOS)
- U+20AC, In unicode, position U+20AC is reserved for the Euro symbol (Euro Currency sign at U+20A0).
Due to the fact that it has taken quite some time to decide the official position for
the Euro symbol in the Latin-1 character set, various fonts are now available.
In particular when converting fonts from Macs and PCs, you may find the Euro symbol at
an alternative position (128, 136 or 164).
Entering the Euro symbol
Entering the Euro symbol is simple and can be done in several ways.
First ensure the position of the Euro symbol in the font you are using.
You may use a program such as !Chars (in the Apps folder) to find the position
of the Euro sign in a given font. When using our AltKeys module, you may use
the letter combination EU. Furthermore, AltKeys allows you to define the
preferred ASCII code linked to the shortcut.
- Use !Chars
- Use !CharSel
- Use the AltKeys module and enter: Alt E U
- Press and hold the Alt-key and enter: 128 (or 164)
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Any links shown in red are currently unavailable.
© X-Ample Technology BV.
Last changed: Friday, 09 January 2004 - 00:47 CET.
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