Hello,
I'm designing a few fonts and I would like to add currency glyphs for bitcoin and namecoin.
Until there is an official currency symbol with an official unicode assignment, any bitcoin symbol in a font (that is not an existing glyph anyway) will need to be assigned to the private area.
I would suggest that we pick a number in the private area that font creators can use for bitcoin until such time that an official unicode assignment is made.
More on private use areas:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Use_AreasI would suggest that we attempt to pick a number that is not already in public use. For example, Apple Computer uses U+F8FF and
http://www.evertype.com/standards/csur/ has un-official assignment for many scripts not in unicode, such as Science/Fantasy fiction languages.
Having an agreed upon Private Use number for the Bitcoin currency symbol would allow us have consistency when changing fonts, the character could easily be used in PDF and ePub documents by embedding the font, and could probably even be used on web pages by specifying webfont that use that number for bitcoin.
My suggestion is that we only agree upon a number, allow the font authors to decide which proposal they want to draw in their font. I like the one by Pander and that is what I will add to my fonts, but by using a consistent number in the unicode private range, until there is an official symbol agreed upon, let the font typographers pick what they like.
Thoughts?
