Malmö, SWEDEN
At 11:56 on 4.3.99
The first print magazine to include the euro symbol in a main piece of cover
story was, I guess, the Newsweek 100+ pages special Euroland issue (November
1998-February 1999). The dollar-esque pre-placement of the currency symbol
is there converted to a double-tounged mouth gasping against some digits.
Here in Sweden, the tabloid Expressen chose to funnify the celebration of
the birth of the latest Occidental numismatic innovation. Their New Year's
Day propaganda meant a dual-pricing on the front page, which almost had me
asking the provision shop owner nearby if I could pay the paper in euro!
Where from can we trace the euro symbol? The creators themselves say it ori-
ginates from the Greek letter epsilon. I'm not ready to settle with that.
Firstly, the euro and the epsilon need different amounts of scribble
switchings. Creating a euro takes lifting the pen three times, while epsilon
lies there visually after merely one curly tour with the writing stick.
Secondly, the euro is not an E. Remember, it's furnished with no less
than four horizontal shelves, from which the middle pair are thinner than
the pixels on a low resolutional computer monitor, according to the European
Commission generic sketch. Fitting in the epsilon in this context premises
confrontations with one of the identical halves of the digit 8.
The size matters, too. Epsilons are small; the euros expose a giant side-
flipped balloon with its extended C. Despite serif incipiences (cf. the
dollar sign and uc S), this zero-shaped overhang sometimes must be regarded
as nothing but a fragile trademark: the perfect rounding will be destroyed
in the beginning of the next sneezing period. The epsilon has dimensioned
the vaulty appearance by dividing it in two. Mirroring it gives a 3. That's
the position the euro gets in the currency mini countdown, after the dollar
and the pound -- these are such outstandingly flexible artifacts!
I tried not to mix the chart of real influence on the global market sce-
nes with the typographical aestethic and naturality of the monetary sorts
symbols; it was not an easy enterprise. The epsilon has a clearer feeling
for ranking system, both in serious phonetics (some of the sounds are de-
noted by e.g. lambdas and thetas) and as a pure part of a Latin alphabet
competitor. Henceforth it occupies the same position on The Graphic Chart
and in the Greek letter chain, following gamma quite directly.
Oops, I almost forgot to mention the etymology of epsilon: sluggishness.
Manufacturing and maintaining costy computer millennium bug preventment is a
full-time job, but people are bound to understand the crucial euro implemen-
tation, too. There is a tardy tendency not to seize the last days before EMU
ignition and giving all typefaces Made in the EC (and used there as well)
with a euro patch. When we're start pasting the euro symbol from the offi-
cial web site, something is wrong. The strictly controlled glyph weight with
its geometrical exacitude is absurd. The three-step solidus movement right
through the crossbars is a probable source of error. That's equal to the
typographic sin of dictatorating bezier curves.
Actually, the euro has another, more logical, predecessor: the old ecu
currency. Its symbol was the letters C and E, not ligaturized, but put down-
stairs right. Not a legible solution, more like the two-letter explanations
to the, hexadecimally speaking, C0 (the 0-31 range) control characters area
grid. Like the rupie sign found in the Uncode currency block, I must admit,
I've never seen the ecu glyph outside the world of computer coding. There's
a great bunch of rarely used signs and symbols never getting an honest
chance of evolutionizing themselves.
That's hardly the case of the euro. In Western personal computers per-
sonal settings it will soon be ubiquitous, but will it melt in on hardcopies
and at screens with a soft touch of comeback (long time, no fresh 8859
element) satisfication nerves? We'll see.
Yes, I've got an astrological parallel on store for you -- in these times
of ubiquitous New Age influences and 2000-year eras. The sign for the planet
Chiron, situated between Saturnus and Uranus, is a C with a plumby bar pair,
laid in a more Western position: the bottom!
Although the EMU project gives priority to converged interest rates at the
expense of structurally crucial unemployment actions, I value it high to
include the euro currency sign in the Amiga fonts. (The 14pt Xander font by
Matt Chaput <mchaput@aw.sgi.com> is the only thus prepared I've seen.) The
market tickers maybe preferring PC terminals for the internal evaluation
display, but for the everyday referral to what hitherto looks like being the
21st century's biggest economic cash and card payment invention, we need the
graphic sign easily accessible, no matter at any time the available computer
platform. Despite the pros and cons of the European Union's monetary part,
it's a fact that almost 300 million Europeans will participate in the circu-
lation of euro bills in a few years. Inspired by the 11 avant-gardist
nations, more and more member states will surely follow, pressurized or not.
When ISO approved the Latin-1 proposal in 1987, dollar, yen and pound
sterling were since long competing in the name of globality. They naturally
had their own ASCII/EBCDIC value. The cent change coin, too, got its own
Latin-1 space. But the important duo of the DM and the franc did not. In the
German case, there is no symbol (not even a widely spread monogram or bi-
letter ligature) functioning as coding foundation, but the French people
found the integral f interpreting their currency sign in additional coding
ranges of character tables like Microsoft Windows CP-1252. Well, that's not
acceptable. The Gates monopoly is of no use for the Mac community, with
users yearning for glyphs falling outside the US-ASCII undertakings...
In December 1998, ISO prepared making Latin-9 a new standard. It replaces
the international currency sign (the shining sun symbol meaning "position"
in cell telephone books), with the euro. Latin-9 is in fact intended to re-
place the entire Latin-1, so it comes with seven other newcomers -- some of
them such strange choices: Finnish linguists say the old retroflex tran-
scribation letters s and z with caron (as regards these characters on
the Amiga, see the virtually unique 13pt AmigaSans by David Marshall
<dave@durge.org>) have been so hard to produce for the computer layman, that
now they can be seen in word books only. In Latin-9 they throw out the
broken vertical bar, and the floating diaeresis, acute accent and cedilla.
On the other side, I highly respect the disappearance of the three vulgar
fractions and the new cells French oe (e dans l'o) diphtong cells. By wel-
coming uc ÿ, a letter-pair unites -- one of subliminal occurence, though.
(Latin-5, merely introducing the Turkish s with cedilla and g with breve,
instead of the Icelandic "tounge forth"-letters eth and thorn, form a
similar space dispute.)
Certainly, Unicode puts an end them. Increasing from single-8 to 10646
poly-16, it's envisaged through "blocks" of cells with four-digit referen-
ces. Yet it has to revolutionize its environmental aim: multi-lingual com-
munitites. When in some cases diacritic letters usurp text symbols like the
pilcrow line feeder (¶), the 9 different ISO Latin tables unfortunately
follow no necessity pattern. And which of them would prefer a euro-update?
Since the rest of the currency cells are filled with Polish letters, Latin-2
users probably would rather get $ or £ in the East European scheme...
The font in this archive is called FlodisEuro. It's kind of a euro com-
patible Latin-1 font (euro at ASCII value 164, _not_ the 128 Microsoft core
fonts choice), with extras such as the most frequent f-ligatures (usually
found as "Expert" elements in digital text faces), three dash lengths, typo-
graphically true quotation marks -- and some other stuff not normally found
in fonts designed for, primarily, Commodore monitors. Once again, these
choices are explicitly mine.
The size details eventually: FlodisEuro is a 12pt serif, proportional
bitmap font, suitable for text viewers, where you only _read_ a document.
My advice is that you keep, or from now on use, a sanserif during the text
editor input process. I cannot be held responsible for the hard- and soft-
ware conflicts resulting from using FlodisEuro in combination with font-
sensitive applications. Feel free to import the euro symbol into other of
the .font files you keep in a certain hidden folder. (For Topaz, there is
a program snip on the Aminet, adding a virtual euro to this built-in relic.
If AmigaOS 3.5 will ship with a euro-furnished default font is unclear.)
The Amiga scene has to have that injection -- consider how seldom you see
new uploads to any of the wustl font folders, and the ttf tendency to pop up
en masse on the net. (Request a commercial font at the address
<fontasia@writeme.com> and you will get it attached to the mail reply!)
What's more, many Amiga faces seem to imitate the Linotype aber of bodies
too small for full-length main letter plus either umlaut dots, circumflex,
ring, or whatever more or less a pronunciation modifier. Unconsistent but
shrink-friendly...
Germans allegedly pay the most attention to Amigas. Why not predict a
euro layout germination among the art-skilled population of one of the
biggest euro markets to come?
Have fun with the font!
wishes
Johan Björnson
(via EdWord Pro V6.0)
|
aminet net>