Short: EURO-COMPATIBLE, 12pt, serif bitmap font face Author: ditto Uploader: Johan Björnson Type: text/font Replaces: FlodisXEN.lha Architecture: generic Url: http://come.to/be.euro-compatible Cell: +46709933940 (SMS via MTN = kewl!) Future: East European (Latin-2) font version 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 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 ) 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 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)