
Ask HN: Which useful symbols are missing from Unicode? - edent
I was looking for the electrical &quot;standby&quot; symbol - AKA IEC5009 &#x2F; IEEE1621. You know, the circle with the line through it. The one that&#x27;s on every single bloody piece of electronic equipment produced since the mid-1970s.<p>It&#x27;s not in the Unicode standard.<p>I can, if I want, have a snowman ☃ or a reversed rotated floral bullet ☙.<p>What other useful and&#x2F;or important symbols are missing from Unicode?
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jloughry
How to propose new characters for Unicode:

[http://www.unicode.org/pending/proposals.html](http://www.unicode.org/pending/proposals.html)

I would be willing help work on this. We could keep the proposal documents on
GitHub as a starting point for others who might need it in future.

If we are going to do this, let's include _all_ the IEC power symbols and keep
them together in a group:

IEC 5007, power on (line) symbol

IEC 5008, power off (circle) symbol

IEC 5009, standby (line through a broken circle) symbol

IEC 5010, power on/off (line inside a circle)

None of these currently in the Unicode pipeline
[http://www.unicode.org/alloc/Pipeline.html](http://www.unicode.org/alloc/Pipeline.html)
of symbols already proposed.

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edent
Sounds good - let's do this :-)

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jloughry
I've updated
[https://github.com/jloughry/Unicode](https://github.com/jloughry/Unicode)
with more information, the beginnings of a project plan, and some research. I
think I can get all the needed IEC, IEEE, and ISO standards through my school.
The next quarterly meeting is at the end of January, so I have a few weeks to
get the proposal written.

Do you know how to make a TrueType or PostScript font? We need a small one
that contains only the new symbols.

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jloughry
I started a project on GitHub to do it:
[https://github.com/jloughry/Unicode](https://github.com/jloughry/Unicode)

