2018-03-08 15:18 GMT+01:00 Frédéric Grosshans via Unicode < [email protected]>:
> Le 17/02/2018 à 23:18, Adam Borowski via Unicode a écrit : > >> Of course, this measure is only rough. A counter example is in the >> monetary symbol block, where € U+20AC EURO SIGN (in Unicode since 2.1) is >> much more used than ₣ U+20A3 FRENCH FRANC SIGN encode since Unicode 1.1 >> (1.0?) but that I never saw, despite living in France for more than four >> decades. > > I actually saw a French franc symbol (not necessarily this one, most often a narrowed version of the "Fr." abbreviation) only on mechanical typewriters built in the 1960-1970's, and some IBM typewriter "balls" in the early 1980's also on some old printers with rotating wheels, This narrow abbreviation was used by typists in accounting and administrative services, typically in tabular data. It was also seen sometimes for indicating the pricing on newspapers/magazines (but not sure it was really a single character, as they were used along with non-monospaced fonts, and was probably only using smaller narrow font styles, without any ligature). I wonder if this symbol was not just outside of France, or in former colonies before the 1960's (or created later to distinguish the French Franc from the CFA Franc). May be it has some use today in Africa as an abbreviation of the CFA (now pegged to the Euro via agreement with Banque de France and the European Commission for the amount of warranties, collected by CFA members and France, and needed to offer this limited warranty of conversion with the Euro on a limited exchange market subject to more restrictive policies), but the two CFA currencies (of the BEAC or BCAO) are not fractions of Euro The CFA-EUR conversion rates are not stable and subject to scheduled changes ,by agreements between CFA members, France and the European commission. And because they are not "liquid" currencies (subject to restrictive conversions and controls), their rates against the Euro on open markets varies constantly (but modestly) around the current designated value decided by CFA banks members and partners: the pegged value is then only indicative of the medium rate it should have on markets. For this reason, most international payments and contracts are made in more liquid major currencies (EUR, GBP, USD, CHF, ZAR, DTS, and gold ounces) but at much more variable rates (and with higher transaction fees on open markets than conversions between major currencies).
