Re: [OT by now] Re: Traditional dollar sign
At 09:30 PM 10/26/03 -0800, Doug Ewell wrote: I can't speak for the whole of the last two centuries, but certainly current American bills and coins do not use either symbol. The bills in common use say ONE DOLLAR, FIVE DOLLARS, TEN DOLLARS, and TWENTY DOLLARS; the coins say ONE CENT, FIVE CENTS (the name nickel is informal), ONE DIME, and QUARTER DOLLAR. The bills are also marked using digits. In my limited experience, that word DIME has done more to confuse furriners than anything else about the U.S. and Canadian monetary systems. The dime is the smallest coin in the set physically, weighing less than half as much as a nickel, and made of (apparently) the same material, yet worth twice as much. The etymology tracing the word dime back to Latin decem (ten) is lost on those who have not grown up with the system, and obvious to those who have. Many monetary systems have coin sizes and weights that are based on the traditional precious or semi-precious metals once used. The nick- name for the nickel gives that away, associating it with a different metal than the (presumably once) silver-based dime/quarter/silver dollar based series. You are correct that often the different series use metals of different color, such as the post-war German Mark, which had a 50 pfennig piece that was smaller than the Groschen (10 pfennig), the former being silver colored. For users of many others systems where this apparent 'inversion' of the size/value relationship is part of the system, the only confusing thing is the color of the nickel - but once you learn its name, it all makes sense. A./
Re: Traditional dollar sign
On 26/10/2003 20:08, John Cowan wrote: Kevin Brown scripsit: Incidentally, as far as I know, neither the dollar symbol nor cent symbol have ever appeared on Australia's paper money or coinage. Is this unusual? I can't speak for the whole of the last two centuries, but certainly current American bills and coins do not use either symbol. The bills in common use say ONE DOLLAR, FIVE DOLLARS, TEN DOLLARS, and TWENTY DOLLARS; the coins say ONE CENT, FIVE CENTS (the name nickel is informal), ONE DIME, and QUARTER DOLLAR. The bills are also marked using digits. The latest issue of UK banknotes do carry the pound sterling sign (with one crossbar), but this is quite new. At least the more recent former issues did not, if I remember correctly. I was surprised to find no Euro symbol on Euro notes or coins. -- Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) http://www.qaya.org/
Re: [OT by now] Re: Traditional dollar sign
On 26/10/2003 21:30, Doug Ewell wrote: ... In my limited experience, that word DIME has done more to confuse furriners than anything else about the U.S. and Canadian monetary systems. The dime is the smallest coin in the set physically, weighing less than half as much as a nickel, and made of (apparently) the same material, yet worth twice as much. The etymology tracing the word dime back to Latin decem (ten) is lost on those who have not grown up with the system, and obvious to those who have. -Doug Ewell Fullerton, California http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/ It did confuse me for a bit. But it shouldn't confuse Australians, who are used to the two dollar coin being half the size of the one dollar coin, and made of the same metal. -- Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) http://www.qaya.org/
Re: [OT by now] Re: Traditional dollar sign
Asmus Freytag scripsit: Many monetary systems have coin sizes and weights that are based on the traditional precious or semi-precious metals once used. The nick- name for the nickel gives that away, associating it with a different metal than the (presumably once) silver-based dime/quarter/silver dollar based series. Silver they were, until 1965 (though the dollar coin retained some silver content until 1970). Now they are a copper core with copper-nickel cladding. The nickel was not minted until 1866, and from 1866 to 1873 competed with the silver half-dime, which was the original five cent coin. Ironically, in 1943-45 nickels were actually minted in silver, as nickel was considered strategic for the war effort. Current nickels are 75% copper and 25% nickel, the same as the cladding of the other coins. (Pennies are copper-clad zinc, however.) -- [T]he Unicode Standard does not encode John Cowan idiosyncratic, personal, novel, or private http://www.ccil.org/~cowan use characters, nor does it encode logoshttp://www.reutershealth.com or graphics. [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: Traditional dollar sign
Hi! snip However, the presence of two opposing conventions serves as a strong hint that there was no consensus in 1966, nor now, as to how glyph variants of the dollar sign were to be used to stand for different types of dollars. I went to school in the 1980's, and both in Victoria and Tasmania I was taught to write it using the double-bar form. My brother in law is a school teacher here in Victoria and says he's been told to teach kids to write it using the double-bar form in Victoria and New South Wales, and strongly discourage the single-bar form. He doesn't know about other states. Kevin later quoted the Decimal Currency Board: (c) where it is necessary to distinguish the Australian dollar from overseas currencies, the letter A should be placed immediately after the dollar sign - $A; Interesting. I've often seen the opposite, A$ or AU$, even in contexts that only involved Australian dollars, not U.S. dollars. Of course you can always just use AUD and USD and be done with it. My bank (ANZ) recently gave me literature related to obtaining foreign currency, and used the form $A (that is, with the double-bar form of the dollar sign, not the single-bar form). Considering the small glossy leaflet was about the rising Australian dollar, it's evidently a recent publication. Their website, however, obviously has no choice but to use the single-bar form due to font authors, who appear to be quite consistently using the single-bar form. Curiously, though, my bank statements from ANZ use this single-barred dollar sign ;) Considering recent publications, the site pasted (thanks to Kevin Brown), the wide knowledge of the (original) double-bar form of the dollar sign, and the fact that it's still taught at schools in Victoria, Tasmania, and New South Wales (possibly other states too, I'm unsure) - does this amount to reasonable evidence of an existing subset of users? The use of the single-bar dollar sign on the website Kevin provided (http://www.abs.gov.au/Ausstats/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/0/c7103f5100c7663fca2569de00293f3c) is obviously because there's no reliable method of displaying the double-bar form! I smell a subset of users which would benefit from disunification right there ;) - Simon
Re: Traditional dollar sign
The holographic strip on the Euro notes shows the Euro symbol when viewed at certain angles. Norbert Peter Kirk wrote: The latest issue of UK banknotes do carry the pound sterling sign (with one crossbar), but this is quite new. At least the more recent former issues did not, if I remember correctly. I was surprised to find no Euro symbol on Euro notes or coins.
RE: Traditional dollar sign
Simon Butcher wrote: My bank (ANZ) recently gave me literature related to obtaining foreign currency, and used the form $A (that is, with the double-bar form of the dollar sign, not the single-bar form). Considering the small glossy leaflet was about the rising Australian dollar, it's evidently a recent publication. Their website, however, obviously has no choice but to use the single-bar form due to font authors, who appear to be quite consistently using the single-bar form. Curiously, though, my bank statements from ANZ use this single-barred dollar sign ;) Considering recent publications, the site pasted (thanks to Kevin Brown), the wide knowledge of the (original) double-bar form of the dollar sign, and the fact that it's still taught at schools in Victoria, Tasmania, and New South Wales (possibly other states too, I'm unsure) - does this amount to reasonable evidence of an existing subset of users? Not really. I was taught the double-bar form for $ in school in Canada. I was also taught to print single-story _a_ and open descender _g_ and _t_ without a curl at the bottom. That never meant to me that fonts using other forms were in any way *wrong*. Certainly _t_ without a curl is far from a normal rendering in fonts. What font did your bank use for that brochure? While the single stroke $ is now much more common than the double stroke version, there are popular fonts with the double stroke, for example, most Garamond fonts, most Baskerville fonts, some versions of Caslon, Einhard, Joanna ... Whoever chose the font for the brochure may not have cared one way or the other about the dollar sign symbol in particular. That your bank statements on the other hand contaisn the single-bar form indicates your bank considers either form acceptable. (It is not a great deal of trouble to edit a font to add a second line to the dollar symbol if the double stroke is really felt to be important, or to shift fonts when printing the dollar sign.) The use of the single-bar dollar sign on the website Kevin provided (http://www.abs.gov.au/Ausstats/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/0/c7103f5100c7663fca2569de00293f3c) is obviously because there's no reliable method of displaying the double-bar form! The website specifies Arial as the font. It could have specified a sans-serif font with double-barred $ for automatic download if this was important to the site designers. That is not totally reliable but is effective on most browers in common use. The website also says: It is not considered practicable to prescribe, for all purposes, exact symbols for dollars sad cents, or precise methods of expressing dollars and cents in words or figures. Considerable latitude is to be allowed to the public in this area, just as at present, in this and other countries, there are several acceptable methods by which amounts of money may be expressed. It also indicates that other forms of the dollar sign are acceptable. Unicode has, quite rightly I think, avoided encoding separately variants of characters preferred in different countries or other environments when they are recogniziably the same character with the same meaning despite differences in presentation. Otherwise we would have Iranian Arabic characters separately encoded from other Arabic characters, Unicial Latin characters encoded separately from Roman characters and so forth. If a choice between single and double stroke in the dollar sign indicates no change in meaning then Unicode should not encode it separately, despite particular preferences that may exist in particular environments, similar to particular differing preferences for italic forms of Cyrillic characters. Such differences belong to the display level, not to the data level. This is especially so as government standards and reccomendations are often notorious for not being followed in actuality. For example, specifications for following an invariant design for the Euro symbol are simply ignored. Jim Allan
Re: Traditional dollar sign
At 20:45 -0800 2003-10-26, Doug Ewell wrote: The European Commission might have chosen to follow this example 30 years later, instead of trying to mandate that the Euro glyph remain invariant in all fonts and contexts. Doug, give that one a rest, OK? That was in 1996. -- Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
Re: Traditional dollar sign
Doug Ewell noted: The dollar sign was used occasionally for decoration on large-sized (pre-1929) U.S. currency, but not on small-sized issues (except for the bank-only $100,000 note). And very rarely even at that. See: http://www.money.org/bebeeexhibit.html for many exhibits of all kinds of U.S. paper money from various periods. Almost none of this, from any period, shows a dollar sign. One exception is the back side of a series 1880 U.S. legal tender note: http://www.money.org/paper/lt1000ser70690.html which shows the double-bar version of the dollar sign. --Ken
Re: [OT by now] Re: Traditional dollar sign
... Ironically, in 1943-45 nickels were actually minted in silver, as nickel was considered strategic for the war effort. Current nickels are 75% copper and 25% nickel, the same as the cladding of the other coins. (Pennies are copper-clad zinc, however.) Prior to 1982, pennies were a 95% copper / 5% zinc alloy. After 1982, pennies are copper-clad, with the cores 97.5% zinc / 2.5% copper. Except for the 1943 pennies, which were, ironically, zinc-clad steel. --Ken
Re: Traditional dollar sign
On 27/10/03 3:13 AM, Simon Butcher [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: 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. 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). I was also taught in an Australian school (Queensland) at the time of our decimal currency chageover, but my experience is exactly the opposite of Simon's. We were taught to use the single bar form to distinguish the Australian dollar from the U.S. dollar. Kevin
Re: Traditional dollar sign
Further to my earlier reply to Simon Baker about the correct symbol for the Australian dollar, the official position is documented at http://www.abs.gov.au/Ausstats/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/0/c7103f5100c7663fca2569de00293f3c? OpenDocument. Regarding the currency symbols, the specific recommendation of the Decimal Currency Board were that: (a) the symbol for the dollar is $ a capital S with two vertical strokes; acceptable alternatives may be used, for example, an S crossed by one vertical stroke; (b) the symbol for the cent is a small letter c; again acceptable alternatives may be used, for example, a c with a stroke through it or some stylised version of the c; (c) where it is necessary to distinguish the Australian dollar from overseas currencies, the letter A should be placed immediately after the dollar sign - $A; These specific recommendations were to be read in the context of the Board's overall recommendations that: It is not considered practicable to prescribe, for all purposes, exact symbols for dollars and cents, or precise methods of expressing dollars and cents in words or figures and, also, The symbols chosen to express dollars and cents should involve the minimum change to existing printing and other equipment So it seems that Simon's and my instruction at school were both far more rigid than what was officially intended. Incidentally, as far as I know, neither the dollar symbol nor cent symbol have ever appeared on Australia's paper money or coinage. Is this unusual? Kevin
Re: Traditional dollar sign
Kevin Brown graphity at adelaide dot on dot net wrote: On 27/10/03 3:13 AM, Simon Butcher [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: 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. 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). I was also taught in an Australian school (Queensland) at the time of our decimal currency chageover, but my experience is exactly the opposite of Simon's. We were taught to use the single bar form to distinguish the Australian dollar from the U.S. dollar. Both of these sound like well-intentioned attempts to create a typographical distinction that never really caught on. If either of these conventions had achieved widespread use, both glyphs probably would have made their way into contemporary character sets. This, in turn, would have paved the way for both to be encoded in Unicode, just as U+00A3 POUND SIGN () and U+20A4 LIRA SIGN () are both encoded due to artificial glyph distinctions. However, the presence of two opposing conventions serves as a strong hint that there was no consensus in 1966, nor now, as to how glyph variants of the dollar sign were to be used to stand for different types of dollars. Kevin later quoted the Decimal Currency Board: (c) where it is necessary to distinguish the Australian dollar from overseas currencies, the letter A should be placed immediately after the dollar sign - $A; Interesting. I've often seen the opposite, A$ or AU$, even in contexts that only involved Australian dollars, not U.S. dollars. Of course you can always just use AUD and USD and be done with it. These specific recommendations were to be read in the context of the Board's overall recommendations that: It is not considered practicable to prescribe, for all purposes, exact symbols for dollars and cents, or precise methods of expressing dollars and cents in words or figures The European Commission might have chosen to follow this example 30 years later, instead of trying to mandate that the Euro glyph remain invariant in all fonts and contexts. Incidentally, as far as I know, neither the dollar symbol nor cent symbol have ever appeared on Australia's paper money or coinage. Is this unusual? Not necessarily. As far as I can tell, the cent sign has never been used on any regular-issue U.S. coin. The dollar sign was used occasionally for decoration on large-sized (pre-1929) U.S. currency, but not on small-sized issues (except for the bank-only $100,000 note). Other countries do tend to make greater use of currency symbols on their legal tender. -Doug Ewell Fullerton, California http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
Re: Traditional dollar sign
. John Cowan wrote, ... the coins say ONE CENT, FIVE CENTS (the name nickel is informal), ONE DIME, and QUARTER DOLLAR. And HALF DOLLAR and ONE DOLLAR. In 1883, the U. S. Mint changed the design on the five cent piece. The word CENTS was omitted from the new design, and the Roman numeral V (or, Ⅴ) was used in place of the digit 5. Unscrupulous people passed gold-plated specimens to unsuspecting individuals as the new five dollar gold pieces. The U. S. Mint hastily added to word CENTS to the design, that very same year. Best regards, James Kass .
[OT by now] Re: Traditional dollar sign
John Cowan cowan at mercury dot ccil dot org wrote: I can't speak for the whole of the last two centuries, but certainly current American bills and coins do not use either symbol. The bills in common use say ONE DOLLAR, FIVE DOLLARS, TEN DOLLARS, and TWENTY DOLLARS; the coins say ONE CENT, FIVE CENTS (the name nickel is informal), ONE DIME, and QUARTER DOLLAR. The bills are also marked using digits. In my limited experience, that word DIME has done more to confuse furriners than anything else about the U.S. and Canadian monetary systems. The dime is the smallest coin in the set physically, weighing less than half as much as a nickel, and made of (apparently) the same material, yet worth twice as much. The etymology tracing the word dime back to Latin decem (ten) is lost on those who have not grown up with the system, and obvious to those who have. -Doug Ewell Fullerton, California http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
Traditional dollar sign
Hi! Just a quick question.. The description for U+0024 (DOLLAR SIGN) states that the glyph may contain one or two vertical bars. Is there a codepoint specifically for the traditional double-bar form, or any plan to include one in the future? 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. 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). Cheers! - Simon
Re: Traditional dollar sign
At 03:36 AM 10/26/03 +1100, Simon Butcher wrote: Just a quick question.. The description for U+0024 (DOLLAR SIGN) states that the glyph may contain one or two vertical bars. Is there a codepoint specifically for the traditional double-bar form, or any plan to include one in the future? No. 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. 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. In theory, this could be done here as well, but any thoughts in that direction would need to be preceded by clear and compelling evidence of an actual requirement. The case of an official preference that has never been widely adhered to -- which is what you have described -- would probably not qualify as grounds for taking any action. A./
Re: Traditional dollar sign
On 25/10/2003 10:16, Asmus Freytag wrote: At 03:36 AM 10/26/03 +1100, Simon Butcher wrote: Just a quick question.. The description for U+0024 (DOLLAR SIGN) states that the glyph may contain one or two vertical bars. Is there a codepoint specifically for the traditional double-bar form, or any plan to include one in the future? No. 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. 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. In theory, this could be done here as well, but any thoughts in that direction would need to be preceded by clear and compelling evidence of an actual requirement. The case of an official preference that has never been widely adhered to -- which is what you have described -- would probably not qualify as grounds for taking any action. A./ The situation seems very similar to that for U+20A4 vs. U+00A3. I was taught at school in the UK, and I guess Australians were taught before 1966, to write the pound sign with two bars like U+20A4, and in fact I still usually do so in handwriting. But today the single-barred version is much more common in print in the UK. And the notes for U+20A4 suggest that this became true also in Italy, before the Euro was introduced. I wonder how long before the Euro will also de facto have a single bar? -- Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) http://www.qaya.org/
RE: Traditional dollar sign
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
RE: Traditional dollar sign
At 11:02 AM 10/26/03 +1100, Simon Butcher wrote: 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! But we knew that. 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'). If their font uses that other shape, that's what they get. Only when the distinction is required, (as demonstrated in actual use, not just what you get taught in school) should we disunify. 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. I've never seen a widely used font with both symbols in it. That alone suggests that the unification is correct. For the case of the Lira, I plead ignorance on the specific justification (and whether I would have considered it important). The fact is that the source for it is buried in the early drafts of Unicode, probably predating my involvement - so the only thing I can note is that TUS 4.0 points out that 00A3 should be used (i.e. suggests a defacto unification in recommended use). A./
Re: Traditional dollar sign
From: Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] I wonder how long before the Euro will also de facto have a single bar? This is already done since the birth of the symbol, when some legal texts specify that (if nothing else) a uppercase letter E can be used in environments that don't support the exact initial euro symbol design. And in fact I can see now a lot more variants of the symbols in ads and other commercial displays, using one of the many forms that have appeared for that symbol. And I am myself handwriting it sometimes with a single bar, which sometimes looks just like a tallwide lowercase e in which the single bar touches the top right corner of a slanted curve, simply because I usually draw the horizontal stroke before this curve, forgetting to draw the second bar or drawing it too often on top of the first bar. If there are effectively semantic differences between a single-bar and double-bar glyph for the dollar in Australia, New Zealand or other countries using this symbol, and and the glyph for the US dollar, the variant may be the best solution to represent them (letting users select a font that makes this distinction). I bet it will be exceptional.
Re: Traditional dollar sign
From: Simon Butcher [EMAIL PROTECTED] Hi! Just a quick question.. The description for U+0024 (DOLLAR SIGN) states that the glyph may contain one or two vertical bars. Is there a codepoint specifically for the traditional double-bar form, or any plan to include one in the future? 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. 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). There's a similar consideration in French primary schools about the correct way to draw the decimal digits: the handwritten barred form of digit seven is mandatory to avoid confusion with the handwritten digit one, and the uppercase L with stroke and zigzag forms of digit four are also prohibited. In school books, they are shown correctly, but this rule is rapidly forgotten when children are used to correctly draw digits easy to differentiate.
