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Ask HN: Which useful symbols are missing from Unicode?
3 points by edent on Dec 1, 2013 | hide | past | web | favorite | 4 comments
I was looking for the electrical "standby" symbol - AKA IEC5009 / IEEE1621. You know, the circle with the line through it. The one that's on every single bloody piece of electronic equipment produced since the mid-1970s.

It's not in the Unicode standard.

I can, if I want, have a snowman ☃ or a reversed rotated floral bullet ☙.

What other useful and/or important symbols are missing from Unicode?




How to propose new characters for Unicode:

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 of symbols already proposed.


Sounds good - let's do this :-)


I've updated 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.


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




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