사용자:이형주/유로 기호

€

유로 기호 (€)는 유럽 연합 (EU)의 공식 통화인 유로에 쓰이는 통화 기호이다. 1996년 12월 12일, 유럽 위원회는 대중에게 유로 기호의 디자인을 발표하였다. 유로의 ISO 4217 코드는 EUR 이다.

Design

The euro sign in a selection of fonts.

The euro currency sign (€) was designed to be similar in appearance to the old sign for the European currency unit, ₠. After a public survey had narrowed the original ten proposals down to two, it was up to the European Commission to choose the final design. The eventual winner was a design allegedly created by a team of four experts who have not been officially named.

“ Inspiration for the € symbol itself came from the Greek epsilon (Є) – a reference to the cradle of European civilisation – and the first letter of the word Europe, crossed by two parallel lines to ‘certify’ the stability of the euro. ”

— European Commission

The official story of the design history of the euro sign is disputed by Arthur Eisenmenger, a former chief graphic designer for the European Economic Community, who claims he had the idea prior to the European Commission.

The European Commission specified a euro logo with exact proportions and colours (PMS Yellow foreground, PMS Reflex Blue background [1]), for use in public-relations material related to the euro introduction. While the Commission intended the logo to be a prescribed glyph shape, font designers made it clear that they intended to design their own variants instead.

Use on computers

Official graphic construction of the euro logo.

Generating the euro sign using a computer depends on the operating system and national conventions. Some mobile phone companies issued an interim software update for their special SMS character set, replacing the less-frequent Japanese yen sign with the euro sign. Later mobile phones have both currency signs.

The euro is represented in the Unicode character set with the character name EURO SIGN and the code position U+20AC (decimal 8364) as well as in updated versions of the traditional Latin character set encodings. In HTML, the € entity can also be used. The HTML entity was only introduced with HTML 4.0, shortly after the introduction of the euro, and many browsers were unable to render it. The alternative was to use € instead, with 128 (80 hexadecimal) being the code position of the euro sign in most Windows 125x encodings.

This kind of usage, where the character encoding used was not explicitly declared (or could not be declared), along with the fact that the code position of the euro sign is different in common encoding schemes, led to many problems displaying the euro sign in computer applications. While displaying the euro sign is no problem as long as only one system is used (provided an up to date font with the proper glyph is available), things tended to go wrong in mixed setups. One example is a Content management system where articles are stored in a database using a different character set than the editor's computer. Another is legacy software which could only handle older encodings such as ISO 8859-1 that contained no euro sign at all. In such situations, character set conversions had to be made, often introducing conversion errors such as a question mark (?) being displayed instead of a euro sign.

Care has been made to avoid replacing an existing obsolete currency sign with the euro sign. That could create different currency signs for sender and receiver in e-mails or web sites, with confusions about business agreements as a result.

The Compose key sequence is '=' and 'C'.

Use of the sign

A euro light sculpture at the European Central Bank in Frankfurt.

 이 부분의 본문은 Linguistic issues concerning the euro입니다.

Placement of the sign also varies. Partly since there are no official standards on placement, countries have generated varying conventions or sustained those of their former currencies. For example, in Ireland and the Netherlands where former currency signs (£ and ƒ, respectively) were placed before the figure, the euro sign is universally placed in the same position. In many other countries, including France and Germany, an amount such as €3.50 is often written as 3,50€ or 3€50 instead, largely following conventions for their former currencies.

In English language use, like the dollar sign ($) and the pound sign (£), the euro sign is generally placed before the figure, as used by publications such as the Financial Times and The Economist.

No official recommendation is made with regard to the use of a cent sign, and usage differs between and within member states. Sums are often expressed as decimals of the euro (for example €0.05 or €–.05 rather than 5c). The most common abbreviation is "c", but the cent sign "¢" also appears. Other abbreviations include "ct" (partly in Germany), "snt" (Finland), and the capital letter lambda (Λ for λεπτό, "lepto") in Greece.

Further reading

• Commission of the European communities Communication from the Commission: The use of the €uro symbol(PDF) 23 July 1997 [COM(97) 418 final]

• The euro symbol