The Unicode Receipt
Yesterday I dropped by one of my favorite bookstores, Tempo Books in Tenleytown, DC. They specialize in foreign language books, among other things, so being a language nut, I always walk out a bit richer (and poorer).
Anyway, yesterday I noticed that they had written “thank you” in several languages on the receipt:
Thank you - Merci - Gracias - Obrigado - Evcharisto - Grazie - Danke - Spasibo - Arigato Gozaimashita - Takk - Shukran
The bold words are normally written in another script:
Evcharisto ευχαριστω
Spasibo Спасибо
Arigatou Gozaimashita ありがとうございます
Shukran ﺷﻜﺮﺍﹰ
It’s interesting to think about particular contexts where the ASCII legacy is very strong, and I think that Point of Sale machines are an example of this. I’m curious whether any Point of Sale systems out there use anything besides ASCII.
Maybe some day we’ll have receipts that can handle something like this:
Uh, those in France and Germany speak ISO-8859-1 I think. Some of them.
I have native scripts on my receipts from Japan, China, Czech Republic, Greece… Fully multilingual, though, may be another question.
Note, btw,that it does make the expense claim process quite a lot more difficult. I’m usually glad I can usually figure out the non-Latin stuff so I can tell which receipt came from where. I’m not sure how the tax man would deal with it if he ever had to check.
I can only dream of proper receipts here in South Africa. I recently blogged about a South African airline’s website that can’t even handle non-ASCII names - something that could affect a portion of the South African population. And this is on the web in all its supposed power…
Afrikaans can fit into ISO-8859-1, so that would solve the problem for Afrikaans, but for at least one of our languages, there is no 8-bit encoding - Venda.