Soon, press Alt+4 to get rupee symbol Published: Tuesday, Feb 8, 2011, 2:16 IST By Arun Jayan | Place: Mumbai | Agency: DNA Rupee symbolThe Indian rupee has finally got a place on the computer keyboard.
The symbol will be placed above the numeral 4, alongside the dollar sign. A user just has to press the right 'Alt' key along with '4' to get the symbol. The Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS), New Delhi, has approved the proposal submitted by the Department of Information Technology (DIT), a project implemented by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Pune. Mahesh Kulkarni, group coordinator of C-DAC's graphic intelligence-based script technology (Gist), told DNA that all the major original equipment manufacturers (OEM) like Microsoft, Linux, IBM, HP and HCL have been notified to roll out keyboards with the rupee symbol. "The Unicode Consortium in USA, which sets language standards, had earlier approved the proposal to encode the symbol as per Unicode standards. BIS has now given its nod. We finalised the position after various rounds of discussion with all major stakeholders. Since it is two-layered (ALT and 4) it will be easy for the end user to type the symbol," he said. He said it would just be a matter of months before the new keyboards are rolled out by the OEMs and operating systems like Microsoft, and Linux would also integrate it. "In three days, we will complete the inscript keyboard with the new symbol. We are coming up with an enhanced version of the Indian language keyboard, which will have Indian numerals on it," said Kulkarni. A high-level meeting under the Union ministry of information technology is scheduled be held in New Delhi. It will discuss the enhanced version keyboard and take a final call regarding the project. "We have almost completed it and we will be presenting the enhanced Indian version keyboard proposal to DIT. It will in turn submitit to BIS," he said. A Microsoft official said that once the company integrates the new rupee symbol, the new keyboards with the symbol can be produced in the next production cycle. "Once integrated, a user of all applications like Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint among others would be able to use the symbol," said the official. Get numbers right this time, help the census with correct disability info!
