Why is there no cent symbol?

[Ruby]

I've searched the board and archive but can't believe this hasn't been covered before.

Why does the cent sign not appear in most font sets? Why isn't it on a standard keyboard?

It looks rather silly to say "That's just my $.02."

[Q.E.D.]

My WAG is that it isn't included because it's so rarely used.

[elmwood]

It's irrelevant now.

Back in the good 'ol days, there were probably more products available to consumers that were priced under one dollar than above it. There was a greater need for the cent sign.

[Mr. Matthew]

ALT-0162 ¢

As for why it's not around, I'd hazard the WAG that it's a matter of utility. People simply don't have much need for it.

Why Scroll Lock remains is a mystery to me.

[Early Out]

Actually, it does appear in most font sets (as Alt+0162). It has always surprised me that it never made it onto the standard keyboard, especially when characters like tilde (~) and caret (^) do appear on the keyboard!

[Hail Ants]

In Windows, hold down ALT and press (on the numeric keypad) 0162 (you must include the leading zero):

¢

Voila!

[5 time champ]

and on the Mac platform the simple ALT 4 will render at ¢

[viking]

Early Out: the tilde and caret are much used in programming and unix, which were prevalent uses for computers when keyboards were being invented.

[Lumpy]

The problem is that not all fonts use the ANSI standard upper-ascii set for bytes 128-255. You can embed character 0169 in your message, but not everyone will see a cents (¢) sign. I do recall seeing the cents sign as one of the uppercase characters on some typewriter keyboards, but apparently it didn't make the jump to terminal and PC keyboards. I guess it's because accounting these days has decimalized prices, eliminating the old dollars and cents scheme.

[yabob]

Background on the development of ASCII:

http://www.wps.com/projects/codes/index.html

Short answer - yes, the 1967 ASCII character set was heavily influenced by programming language notions of the time (notably COBOL). Also, they wished to include "diacritical marks" like the tilde. However, UNIX came later, and assigned the uses it wanted from the available characters - the 1967 ASCII set is, by and large, the set represented on the modern keyboard.

Additionally, in the late 50's/early 60's there was an explosion of "automatic" computer programming (eg. what were to become compilers and interpreters), and the designers of these wanted to use the rich, traditional set of mathematical symbols, as well as "my idea is bigger than your idea", so there were many competing camps and clashing ideas on what characters should go into extremely cramped code sets (and small keyboards). ALGOL favored a large set, COBOL used common typewriter characters. Since the U.S. military vastly preferred COBOL (one of it's major proponents was Grace Hopper, later Admiral Hopper), it won, since the military, the Army in particular, was heavily at the forefront of computer $tandardization.
Programming languages, however, did not tend to make use of "cents", even if it DID appear on typewriter keyboards, so it got bumped in favor of other characters.

[Achernar]

Originally posted by Lumpy
You can embed character 0169 in your message, but not everyone will see a cents (¢) sign.They should if they're using a web browser. The cent sign is one of the HTML defined symbols, so it should show up. If you're human, you probably have an easier time remembering words than numbers, so you can also consider doing this, which will work in HTML, but will probably not work in things like Word documents:

¢

[shijinn]

you can use the character map under accessories if you're using windows..

[tomndebb]

To expand on yabob's point: the original uses of computers were purely business or scientific in nature. The cent sign is fine for posting above a bin full of apples, but on a spread sheet, the cost is going to be reckoned in hundredths of dollars. There really was no actual reason to include the cent sign in the earliest applications. Added to that was the construction of the high-speed printer which had a deliberately limited character set. By including fewer characters, the print chain did not have to cycle as far in order to get to the correct character to strike. (Remember, computers were around for over 30 years before laser and ink-jet printing was developed.) The (high speed) print chains actually lacked some characters that were available on the keyboard, so adding more keyboard characters was really contra-indicated.

On the IBM (EBCDIC) keyboards, the cent from the older typewriters (shift + 6) was replaced by the "logical not," (a hyphen with a small downstroke on the right side that I may be able to replicate (but which may not show up on all browsers) "¬"). The non-IBM character sets did not use that sign, so languages developed in other environments began to use the exclamation point or backslash to indicate "not" and the character over the digit 6 was then given to the carat which was used in a number of non-IBM applications. And the cent continued to be left off the base character set.

[Geek Mecha]

Minor nitpick:

On a Mac, it's Option-4.

[spinky]

Originally posted by Achernar
You can embed character 0169 in your message, but not everyone will see a cents (¢) sign.
They should if they're using a web browser. The cent sign is one of the HTML defined symbols, so it should show up. Not true. The correct way to include a cent sign in your HTML is to use "¢", as you also pointed out, not a single character with ASCII value 162 (nit: 169 is the copyright symbol). The whole point of the html entities is that putting an extended ASCII character in the document, rather than an abstracted representation of it, won't work on all web browsers.

[Achernar]

You are correct, and I apologize for my sloppiness; I only meant that it will work on this board. I believe from experience that on this board, an Extended ASCII 162 will show up as a Unicode 162. But in general in HTML documents, you should use the escape sequence.

[Ruby]

Once again, the Teeming MillionsTM come to the rescue.

I do a lot of desktop publishing ads for my husband's business and can tell you that the cents sign would have come in handy on more than one occasion.

¢

Cool!

[NoClueBoy]

Once again, look here (http://home.earthlink.net/~awinkelried/keyboard_shortcuts.html)

I don't know if this list is complete, but it's very helpful.

[Troy McClure SF]

Originally posted by 5 time champ
and on the Mac platform the simple ALT 4 will render at ¢

Traitor! Seize him!

And on a Mac 9.x and below, you can find all those weird symbols by opening  (Apple) Menu> Key Caps, and press the keys you want to see (shift, option, control...). I dunno about OSX, though.

[Urban Ranger]

¢

You can use ¢ in HTML

[MeanOldLady]

Hmm, doesn't work for me. Perhaps it's b/c I'm on a laptop that doesn't have the numeric keyboard on the side. Doesn't work with the numbers up top either. Does this mean I'll never be able to make the cents sign? :(

[Achernar]

Not at all. Just use ¢ for things like this message board, and things like word processors, open Character Map and copy it from there.

[scr4]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger
¢

You can use ¢ in HTML

I just want to say that this is the only cent symbol that displayed correctly on my PC (Win2k Japanese version) with default settings.

[Geek Mecha]

Key Caps is indeed available in Mac OS X.

Macintosh HD > Applications > Utilities > Key Caps

[Achernar]

Originally posted by scr4
I just want to say that this is the only cent symbol that displayed correctly on my PC (Win2k Japanese version) with default settings.Excellent. Then I feel justified in denouncing that horrible numerical key sequence. Everyone should use ¢! ;) What browser are you using, just out of curiosity?

[Derleth]

ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is a seven-bit character encoding scheme. That means only seven bits are used to encode every character in the ASCII encoding scheme. That gives 128 code points, because seven bits can represent the numbers 0-127 inclusive. In ASCII, as ASCII was meant to be used on rather limited communications lines, the lower codepoints were used for control characters (like ACK, or Acknowledge), giving an even more limited set of characters for ASCII implementers to play with. Looking at a chart, only 32-126 are used for actual, typable characters (127 happens to be DEL, or the Delete character).

So basically, they made compromises. Those compromises were based on the characters used to write American English (so no accented characters made it) and the programming languages of the day. The cent glyph simply didn't make the cut.

But ASCII wasn't, and isn't, the only character encoding. EBCDIC, or Extended Binary Coded Data Interchange Code, was developed by IBM to further dependence on its equipment, and EBCDIC (at least some versions of it) included the cent symbol. EBCDIC was downright ugly compared to ASCII, however, and it was never used outside of IBM mainframes, minicomputers, terminals, and the hardware that had to talk with those dinosaurs.

(Why only seven bits when most computers use, and used, eight-bit bytes? The high-order bit was meant to be used for parity, to determine if the byte had been damaged by the network.)

Anyway, most computers to use ASCII had eight-bit bytes. Once the need to check for parity had gone the way of the old, unreliable networks, the high-order bit was used to extend ASCII to include extra characters.

This was great, but there was no standard to determine which characters would be included, or where. Old IBM-PCs and compatibles used the upper characters (from 128-255, inclusive) for drawing characters (lines and shaded boxes and such) to make up for the crappy graphical capabilites of those little toys. Later, Microsoft would create a few codepages of ASCII extensions to encode Cyrillic and Western European and Turkish. That was fine until you needed to write a Turkish name and a Russian name in the same document. Different computer companies made different extensions, creating a tower of babel reminscent of the pre-ASCII era. ANSI defined a standard ASCII extension, but it wasn't used as widely as other ASCII extensions were.

The One True ASCII Extension is called Unicode, a multi-byte character encoding scheme that aims to include everything, from Hangul to Chinese to Arabic to Cherokee to Elvish. As Unicode can use multiple bytes per character, it can standardize the placement of any number of glyphs while remaining backwards-compatible with ASCII. Big win indeed. :)

[tomndebb]

EBCDIC . . . was never used outside of IBM mainframes, While CDC used ASCII (at least in the late 1970s), Burroughs certainly used EBCDIC. I'm not sure, but I believe that a couple of others in the B.U.N.C.H. also used EBCDIC.

[Swirdle]

I would like a 'tick' on my keyboard. Not a tick as in like a flea, or a clock sound.

A tick symbol. Like er, err, like a square root without the false start. It would be much more use than a lotta stuff available on the character map.

[PlasmaWhore]

Was the $ originally used to represent a string? I remember having to use it all the time when programming on my commodore.

[MeanOldLady]

&cent

(previews)

It worked! Yay! :)

[Early Out]

Originally posted by viking
Early Out: the tilde and caret are much used in programming and unix, which were prevalent uses for computers when keyboards were being invented.
Well, you might be onto something, but computers weren't even a science fiction fantasy when keyboards were invented. The computer keyboard evolved directly from the typewriter keyboard, which predates computers, adn programming, by many decades.

Now, the interesting side question is whether old typewriter keyboards had the cents sign on them! I seem to recall that they did, but I haven't seen an old manual typewriter in years, so there's no way to check.

The reason I say that you might be onto something is that it's possible that, when the typewriter keyboard was being adapted to computer use, the folks who were doing it made some selective character substitutions that more closely met their needs.

[Derleth]

Plasma, the dollar sign is used in DOSes (and some other microcomputer OSes) to terminate a string constant. Is that what you mean? But as ASCII was developed in the 1960s, that wasn't its `original' use by any stretch.

(Remember, the history of electronic computing extends thirty years before the first home computers hit the scene. :))

[bordelond]

Originally posted by English Cid
I would like a 'tick' on my keyboard. Not a tick as in like a flea, or a clock sound.

A tick symbol. Like er, err, like a square root without the false start. It would be much more use than a lotta stuff available on the character map.

A tick symbol, AKA in the States as a "check mark", is available in certain fonts. Look throught the character set of the font Marlett on a Windows machine.

[tomndebb]

Now, the interesting side question is whether old typewriter keyboards had the cents sign on them! I have one ancient typewriter where the ¢ is above the 6 and a second, somewhat newer typewriter, where the ¢ is on a separate key to the right of the colon and semi-colon. @ is above the ¢ on the separate key and the quotation marks are elsewhere.

[Omphaloskeptic]

Originally posted by MeanOldLady
Hmm, doesn't work for me. Perhaps it's b/c I'm on a laptop that doesn't have the numeric keyboard on the side. Doesn't work with the numbers up top either. Does this mean I'll never be able to make the cents sign? :(
The PC ALT codes only work using the numeric keypad. But don't lose hope yet! If your laptop simulates the numeric keypad using the Fn key or similar (often using 789/UIO/JKL on the regular keyboard--look for numbers on or near these keys), then you might be able to get the symbols using Fn+Alt+(numbers). You probably need to make sure NumLock is on, too.

[Early Out]

Thanks, tomndebb. I thought I remembered the ¢ symbol being on old typewriter keyboards, but you know what they say about the memory, and how it's the first thing... oh, wait... what is it they say? What thread is this? Who am I?

[King Friday]

That's one of my favorite riddles..."what key appears on a typewriter but not on a keyboard?"

[The Tropical Warlord]

06

[The Tropical Warlord]

Ack, I'm sorry about that. I was just lurking and accidentally hit the 'submit reply' button at the bottom of the page.

[AHunter3]

English CidI would like a 'tick' on my keyboard. Not a tick as in like a flea, or a clock sound.

A tick symbol. Like er, err, like a square root without the false start. It would be much more use than a lotta stuff available on the character map.

Testing: �

(That's Option - V which on a Mac makes a mark that does useful double-duty as a square-root sign or a check mark)

Looks good on preview. Here goes...

[tomndebb]

AHunter3's symbol displays as the "unprintable character square" on my browser.

In the charmap.exe program, the square root symbol is listed as Unicode 221A. I am pasting that in here, "�ã"

When pasted in, it looked good, however, on preview, I see that the character is, apparently, a double-byte character that presents a no-print square followed by a lower-case "a" with a carat. (And that is just in preview; who knows how it will display to the Teeeming Millions when it is posted.) I do not know whether there is a way to tell the browser to recognize double-byte characters on the fly (i.e. without programming a routine to handle it), so I suspect that the square root character is still unavailable for general use.

[Achernar]

You can get Unicode characters from the hex by doing something like this:

√

becomes....

√

Looks like a checkmark on my browser (Netscape 7).

[AHunter3]

tomndebb's Unicode character come through on my browser as the trademark symbol � followed by the a with tilde (ã) between straight quotation marks --

end result "�ã"

[Balthisar]

It's all character encoding. Achernar's checkmark looks okay on Win2K/Mozilla.

If you have a halfway decent browser, you should be able to manually change the encoding. Look for "character coding" or "coding" or whatnot.

If I look at the source code for this very page (you know, this one you're reading) there's no character coding expressed at all. Mozilla is showing it as Western ISO 8859-1, but I don't know if that's "auto detected" or just a default for non-specified pages.

If I hope over to Google, right away the page source reveals "charset=UTF-8" and Mozilla indicates it as Unicode. UTF8 is a hybrid kind of Unicode, whereby a character is represented by either one or two bytes. (off topic explanation of all this deleted)

In any case, if it's not outside the realm of GQ (i.e., not considered a survey) we could all change our encodings and report what we see here for all the above glyphs.

[Derleth]

Mozilla on Linux shows AHunter's character as a question mark, which is the equivalent of the NPC box. In fact, the only of AHunter's characters to come through is the ã.

Achernar's character comes through fine, however.

And Mozilla, being a very good browser, allows you to select character encodings from a wide range of possible options. :D