Kenneth Whistler posted: "It is a deeper subject to figure out how the LIRA SIGN got into Unicode 1.0 in the first place, and I don't have all the relevant documents to hand to track it down. It was certainly already in the April 1990 pre-publication draft of Unicode 1.0 which was widely circulated."
The distinction between pound currency sign and lira currency sign appears in the HP Roman-8 character set, still the default character set in HP laser printers. See http://www.kostis.net/charsets/hproman8.htm. AF is LIRA SIGN and BB is POUND SIGN. Someone must have thought the difference significant to include both glyphs in that set. This might be the source for Unicode. Not including both symbols would have broken encoding to Roman-8. Jim Allan
