EFF Euro fonts

What is Euro?

Euro is the new currency approved by the European Council, as a common currency for the European Union countries which participate in European Monetary Union (EMU). The EMU is introduced in stages, and as one of them, the euro started functioning on the 1st January 1999 as a new monetary unit. The actual bills and coins will not be introduced until 2002, but there is already the need to print the symbol in all sorts of financial documents, reports, price lists and correspondence.

The Euro Symbol

The original "Euro Currency Sign" - which represents ECU (precursor of Euro) - is a combination of upper case letters C and E. The European Monetary Institute has introduced the new symbol for euro, and approved the official shape of the glyph representing it. The designers argue that this is against the typographic precedent, but at present all the euro signs that do not follow the Commission's guidelines, are “unofficial”.The “official” Euro glyph is shown on the left.

The Euro symbol have been assigned a new position in Unicode - U+20AC while the 'Euro Currency Sign' keeps its old position U+20A0. In standard fonts, euro has been assigned to position 128 in Microsoft standard and 136 in Acorn (128 is already used by a Welsh accented letter in Latin 1 encoding). In Macintosh computers the euro sign simply replaces the currency ¤ sign.