euro Currency Symbol FAQ

The euro is the name given to the single currency of the European Union. The euro was established as a currency in 1999 and gradually moved into general use, with the introduction of coins and notes in 2002. For more information see the Euro Web site run by the European Commission.

The form varies depending on the language. In English, 'euro' and 'cent' should not be capitalized, and the plural forms should not include an 's' in official documents.

According to the information posted on the euro Web site, about thirty draft designs were drawn up internally by the European Commission. The general public assessed ten designs, narrowing the shortlist to two. Jacques Santer, president of the European Commission, and Yves-Thibault de Silguy, the European commissioner in charge of the euro, chose the final design.

euro in Arial, Times New Roman and Courier New.

We have chosen to make instances of the euro symbol font- and style-specific. The design of the symbol takes on the characteristics of the font in which it resides.

Traditionally, numerals and currency symbols are the same width for any given font. This helps values line up properly in tabular applications like spreadsheets. To make the euro symbol the correct width for Arial and Times New Roman, it had to be condensed.

The euro character is encoded in the Unicode Standard as U+20AC EURO SIGN. To avoid confusion, the historical character U+20A0 EURO-CURRENCY SIGN has been updated with an informative note and a cross reference to U+20AC EURO SIGN. See the Unicode Consortium's Unicode Technical Report #8 for more details.

The symbol has been added to the following codepages at position '0x80': 1250 Eastern European, 1252 Western, 1253 Greek, 1254 Turkish, 1257 Baltic, 1255 Hebrew, 1256 Arabic, 1258 Vietnamese, 874 Thai. In 1251 Cyrillic, the symbol will be added at position '0x88'. Other codepages are controlled by governments or standards bodies. Microsoft is working with these organizations on the placement of the euro.

To access the euro from your keyboard, please refer to the following chart.

In addition, most keyboard manufacturers, including Microsoft, are now producing keyboards that have a 'euro-key'.

Yes, it should work fine, providing you don't use printer resident fonts that do not include the euro. You may need to adjust your printer setup options, as using resident fonts will probably be the default setting. Look for 'print fonts as graphics' or similar settings in your printer setup options.

Printing fonts as graphics instead of using resident fonts will often result in slower printing. Check with your printer manufacturer to see if they have updated drivers or print managers that may improve performance. Newer printers should have support for the symbol built into their resident fonts.

Initially, Adobe added the euro to their Symbol font. It is encoded at position 240 of the symbol font encoding array. On 27 May 1998, Adobe released three PostScript type families that include the euro currency symbol. These are available for free download from the Adobe Web site. All OpenType fonts from Adobe (except pi/ornaments fonts) include a design-sensitive euro currency symbol

Microsoft includes the symbol within all the original fonts we produce and fonts we supply with our products. Most independent font vendors also now include the symbol within their fonts.

A special euro-related news and links page has been posted in our Links, news and contacts section.