Subject asks it all.
I can see it.
They should, while it’s not a KEY on every keyboard it’s an ascii character and is recognizable by any computer that uses that interface (all of them, though i’m sure there’s some zany exception).
So yes.
By the way, see that little numerical keypad on the right end of your keyboard? Hold alt, enter any combination of digits and release alt to type in one of these ascii characters. It’s fun!
I can, but only after going through the menu and manually selecting the appropriate character encoding. This is on a Japanese version Windows 2000, on both Opera 7 and latest version of IE. However, if you write & # 163 (without spaces) it displays as “£” which I can see with default settings. That’s an HTML code and doesn’t work with UseNet or e-mail.
A couple of times I received e-mail from a British mail order company and couldn’t decipher the price at all. Not only does the pound sign not show up, but it screws up the next character as well. The pound character and the next character are mistaken for a single 16-bit character. One time I couldn’t figure out any way to decipher it (I think the damage was done along the way, not just a display problem on my mail client) so I had to write back and say “please tell me the price again without using the pound sign.”
I can see it.
Can you see this? : €
euro? yes.
Ironically I (the OP) can no longer see my pound sign. (I see a sort of ‘u’ that looks like a jug)
I can see the OP’s as well. Gum, though, yours is a square, which I’m pretty sure wasn’t what you were going for.
§ ooooo
I can see all of the symbols.
It all depends on your browser and how it’s configured.
Email interpretation depends on the coding used when it is sent and received. Some US-centric systems don’t handle it at all well. This is why many use GBP for the “Great British Pound” rather than the £ symbol. It always sounds like an anti-EC slogan to me though.
Is there an accepted abbreviation for the Euro that isn’t the € symbol?
EUR.
See http://www.xe.com/ for listings of currency abbreviations: there’s an international convention for three-letter currency symbols, where the first two characters are the country code and the last one is the first letter of the currency name. Thus, USD = US + D from United States dollar, CAD = CA + D from Canadian dollar, GBP = GB + P from pound sterling, etc.
Ironically, EUR breaks this convention.
pound £ = Option-3
euro € = Option-shift-2
yen ¥ = option-y
cent ¢ = option -4
On my European keyboard, Option-shift-2 does nothing. The euro symbol can be made by hitting Alt Gr-4 (shift-4 is the dollar sign).
The pound sign is NOT an ASCII character, it’s a Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) character, which is an extension of the ASCII set. ASCII was an American standard, there’s nothing in there that isn’t used in American English.
This is the second time this confusion has come up on the SDMB lately, and it’s something of a pet peeve of mine. My favourite resource for character sets is Bertil Wennergren’s page (in Esperanto).
UnuMondo
Most US and Western European users do, but not all users in the world. The SDMB unfortunately does not specify a character set either in the HTTP headers or in the HTML code, so it’s up to the browser having been set to the correct character set (ISO 8859-1) or correctly guessing the character set.
If you specify the pound sign with the following HTML character entity/numerical codes you can at least be sure that either a pound sign or the browser’s way of displaying “cannot display this character” will be shown, but not an incorrect character:
£ = & p o u n d ; (HTML character entity)
£ = & # 1 6 3 ; (Unicode, decimal)
£ = & # x 0 0 A 3 ; (Unicode, hexadecimal (or sedecimal, for purists))
(to display the HTML encoding I had to insert spaces between the characters.)
Tables of Unicode encodings for characters - you can just plug the base-16 codes shown there into the third kind of encoding shown above.
jjimm:
What the heck’s a “Gr”?
UnoMondo:
The pound sign is an upper-ASCII character, as opposed to being in the original 128 which are more standard across-platform than the upper 128. Option-3 gives me a pound sign in MacWrite under Macintosh System 1 (1984 vintage OS and fonts and program) and every American-English MacOS since then. jjimm may be right that European releases were different, especially with the Euro (€). As I said, upper ASCII was never as standardized.
The button to the right of my spacebar is marked “Alt Gr”. I have absolutely no idea what it means, but it seems to be on all Euro-English PC keyboards. Its only use that I can determine is making the € symbol. It’s certainly the only thing I’ve ever used it for.
“Alt Gr” stands for alternate graphic. It’s used for any of the symbols shown to the right of the lower symbol on relevant keys. There are only two such symbols on my keyboard (the € and also the ¦ symbol to the left of the 1 key), but it’s used more on certain non-English keyboards. If your keyboard doesn’t have it, you can use Ctrl+Alt to get the same result.
Except that Alt-4 doesn’t produce the euro symbol, whereas Alt Gr-4 does.