Proposing an Unicode supported symbol for Steem: ȿ

in #steem8 years ago (edited)

Introduction: What led to this writeup:

In the Steemd.com/witnesses overview page a column exists to reflect the "bias" of the witness in regards to the current Steem marketprice she/he submits.

'To supply regular pricefeed updates' is a job for the witnesses, in order to reach consensus in regards to the price of Steem (which is used if you use for example the 'Convert to Steem' in your wallet.

As a kind of default standard, witnesses supply these 'pricefeed updates' by using the quote of '1.000 Steem' and then their calculated price for that quote. Witnesses can adjust the price with a discount or a bias to reflect additional calculations / price algo's and/or their personal opinion of where the price should go or should be. These however where sofar mostly calculated into the 'price' parameter part of the 'pricefeed updates'.

However this is not really transparent and therefore some witnesses started to follow @blocktrades pricefeed/quote setup and publish the 'pricefeed' value as a direct result of the current marketplace calculations and calculate their own 'bias/discount' into the 'quote'-parameter. Which leads to a separation of the market-price and the 'bias %' of the witness and more transparency in this matter. I think i will move towards this system soon as well with my witness roelandp.


So far the introduction, let's move to the gist, shall we?


I noticed that in the aforementioned witness overview 'bias / quote'' column the dollar sign ($) is used, just like in the price column. However, the Price column value is in SBD and the Quote column value is in Steem. To different currencies, with the same currency symbol, to me doesn't sound logical, although I understand it from a design point of view to have a currency symbol.

I started searching across the Unicode tables to find another $ like currency symbol which had some resemblance with the Steem (St-part) as well.

Quite some symbols with S like figures can be found, like:

In the end I think the following symbol for indicating Steem on a keyboard based text seem fitting: "latin small letter s with swash tail" (U+023F):

ȿ

Why this symbol?

  1. The tail hints to the horizontal bar of Steem's second letter T.
  2. The symbol is part of the Latin Extended B and therefore widely supported by browsers and default fonts.
  3. Tested on Android, iPhone, Mac, Windows.

Originally I had another symbol in mind, the Ꞩ, however this Unicode symbol is part of the Latin Extended D collection and has far less support amongst default fonts, resulting in ?-garbled characters on many occasion and not being able to find it in Design programs such as Photoshop, Sketch and Illustrator.

How to type this symbol on your keyboard?

(Was asked by @firepower). Of course you could visit this page every time and or copy it from other places. But if you want to type it yourself here is how you do it:
Windows

  • In Microsoft Word you can insert Unicode characters by typing the hex value of the character (023f) then hitting Alt key+ X
  • Holding down the ALT key and typing the plus sign on the numeric keypad followed by the character value sequence: 023f

Apple Mac

  1. Choose Unicode Hex Input as keyboard instead of language (Sys prefs > Keyboards > Input sources (search Unicode)
  2. Hold down the ALT key and type the character sequence '023f'.

Android / iPhone

  • Install an application for your phone by searching 'Unicode'. Find the code by searching for '023f'
  • Copy paste the symbol 'ȿ' in a notepad app somewhere or store it as a contact.

Additional details of the ȿ:

Unicode Code Point U+023F
Script Latin
Category Lowercase Letter
Block Latin Extended-B
HTML Entity (Decimal) ȿ
HTML Entity (Hexadecimal) ȿ
URL Escape Code %C8%BF
(Source: Graphemica)

Encodings:

HTML Entity (Decimal) ȿ
HTML Entity (Hexadecimal) ȿ
URL Escape Code %C8%BF
UTF-8 (hex) 0xC8 0xBF (c8bf)
UTF-8 (binary) 11001000:10111111
UTF-16/UTF-16BE (hex) 0x023F (023f)
UTF-16LE (hex) 0x3F02 (3f02)
UTF-32/UTF-32BE (hex) 0x0000023F (0000023f)
UTF-32LE (hex) 0x3F020000 (3f020000)
Octal Escape Sequence \310\277
(Source: Graphemica)

Update: Implemented as a test by @roadscape on Steemd Witness Overview:

What do you think? Does the 'ȿ' seem like a fitting symbol for Steem to you?


Like my posts?

Come meet me at SteemFest and vote for my recently rebranded 'witness' roelandp #35

cheers! ꞦꝋꜫꝲꜹꞤꝱꝕ

Sort:  

That is a good idea and fast and easy to do! 👍😎

I like it! Really!

TEȿȿȿȿȿȿȿȿȿȿT ;-)

Great idea! post and witness upvoted.

I am happy we have you on our community!

Also, I propose that we—like French Quebec, France, Cape Verde, and Portugal—use the in the decimal place. Thus, Twenty-eight point six-five steem would be 28Ȿ650.

Great idea to create a standard currency symbol. I think we should have one for Steem Ȿ, (e.g. 100Ȿ), and another one for Steem Based Dollar Ꞩ, which is placed before the amount like fiat USD (e.g. Ꞩ100.00). We could implement a button to add them into Steemit posts in the editor for ease of use.

yes :) but the Strikethrough S was the original idea for Steem as you can read above however that one is way less supported because it's character set Latin Extended-D (not even avail. in Arial, Verdana, and invisible on mobile browser of iPhone for example).

True. We would need to either find a similar symbol with better compatibility, or wait until it becomes more widely adopted by browsers.

I made a similar proposal for $Đ (SBD being the exchange symbol). https://steemit.com/steemit-ideas/@rubellitefae/a-right-and-proper-currency-symbol-for-sbd-usdd

Ꞩ is also nice. But, Ȿ just pops.

thx. the Strikethrough S is for example not visible on iphone (don't know about android). What do you mean with 'just pops'?

Like other currency symbols ($, €, ¥, £, ₹, ₩, ៛, $Đ) Ȿ sticks out more than Ꞩ. Ꞩ can easily be mistaken for S, S with a strikethrough. And, if one did want to strike through it, the resultant is hard to see: . The descender on Ȿ draws the eye to the whole symbol.

I think the symbol is aesthetically displeasing and would prefer the ASCII ones of STEEM, SD, etc.

do you have an example? If they work well, they should be pasteable here :D

See the instruction in this post how to type in windows / mac.

ȿ

Coin Marketplace

STEEM 0.18
TRX 0.14
JST 0.029
BTC 57849.42
ETH 3122.29
USDT 1.00
SBD 2.43