Rupee! Rupee! Let down your CHAR!

Today's late blog posting was to wait for the actual release. The Rapunzelian pun in the title wll only be completely effective if you pronounce CHAR as "care" (ref How is that pronounced, exactly?)

Perhaps, like me, you have some interest in the languages of India.

Perhaps you have visited.

Perhaps you were born there, or your family was.

Or perhaps you live there right now.

Either way, if you read my If it was me, I'd say "I love the Rupee, and it was my idea!" last July or Unicode 6.0.0 is [virtually] released! last October or Unicode 6.0.0 is [actually] released! last month, you may have been eagerly waiting to find out when Microsoft would be responding to and providing for support of the new Rupee symbol.

Well, I can tell you now, it is available for download, right now!

The details on how to get it for the various 32-bit and 64-bit versions on the x86, x64, and IA64 architectures can be found in

KB 2496898: An update to support the new currency symbol for the Indian Rupee in Windows Vista, in Windows Server 2008, in Windows 7 and in Windows Server 2008 R2

and you can install it now from the Download Center!

Anticipating a question: there is no update for Windows 2000, XP, or Server 2003, as all are out of support now. If you are running one of them you are on your own for rupee support....

The update includes several important pieces:

• Additions of the new rupee to many of the core fonts;
• Updates to the many locales of India to have the new rupee as the currency symbol;
• Updates to many of the keyboards used by the locales of India to add the rupee to them;
• Addition of a new "English - India" keyboard that is like the regular keyboard used by the en-IN locale but with the addition of the rupee

And in addition to telling you all of that, I thought I'd point out some interesting info about the package as well!

Some people may be surprised that the locale data was updated, as this is typically not something that has been done in the past. But there are two reasons that the update was done:

1. There is a very different group of people in charge of the decision making process now, and
2. Due to the bug I mentioned in Win 7 RTM & Arabic: "We can fix up August and April. But it'll cost you July to do it…", the locale.nls file was already being updated in the WINSE tree, so the traditional concerns about the size addition to future service packs that has often blocked such updates doesn't apply for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.

There may be a few folks who had to deal with Euro updates from years ago that didn't have this capability. I guess all I can say is that With massive bugs come huge opportunities. :-)

The updated fonts are limited to:

• Microsoft Sans Serif
• Times New Roman
• Arial
• Segoe UI
• Tahoma

because these fonts are so often the fallbacks and they so often include currency symbols -- discussed before in my Falling back shouldn't mean falling over (though perhaps it does, a bit) -- this saves the patch from having to include hundreds of fonts that might have to see updates in a major release (this way they got away with just 17 files).

And finally there is the fascinating story of the keyboards.

The new en-IN keyboard has the rupee right at ALTGr+4, as people might want, though that comes at a price: on the English keyboard one can use either ALT key to get to the ALT shift state and to accelerator keys, but on this keyboard the right ALT key is no longer an ALT key: it's ALTGr. I spent a little time using it and it tripped me up, so it is just something to keep in mind....

Also, for the other keyboards, many of them already had assignments to the ALTGr+4 key (basically all of the numbers were in the ALTGr state), so the rupee could not be added there.

After a lot of discussion, the consistent placement at CTRL+SHIFT+4 was chosen (CTRL+SHIFT+1 and CTRL+SHIFT+2 already have ZERO WIDTH JOINER and ZERO WIDTH NON-JOINER). And that same key combination was added to the en-IN keyboard just to have that one point in consistency (though that led to six separate emails to me asking about why the rupee was in two places on the new keyboard layout; I suppose I should be happy people were looking!).

Now there are a few things that weren't updated -- like the data behind GetStringTypeW, the collation data, the name that would show up in Character Map, and so forth -- there is really only so much that can be done in between releases, so there are a few things that will stay missing for the time being....

But there you have it -- the Rupee support has finally arrived!

When I think about the fact that symbol was chosen just eight months ago, the fact that it has made it through the addition/update processes of Unicode, an ISO standard, and four versions of Windows -- all of which can often take years to see changes more typical or ordinary -- is nothing short of amazing....