As a common question on the forum led to the addition of 4½ characters to Unicode

A few geeks got their way.

It turns out that adding characters to Unicode is quite realistic if you spend enough time and effort. It should only strictly follow the procedure and all rules.

An important event happened yesterday: the Unicode consortium published the official specifications of the new Unicode standard 9.0 . Probably the programmer Terence Eden rejoiced over this event most of all . Two and a half years ago (December 3, 2013), he posted a question on the popular Hacker News developer forum.
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What useful characters are missing in Unicode?

Terence expressed the idea that the absence of the “Food” sign seems to be the most obvious. Familiar character defined in the International Electrotechnical Commission standard IEC 60417-5009 and from about the mid-1970s on almost every electronic device that has a power button.



The only answer to the question was Joe Loughry, a graduate student at Oxford University, a specialist in testing and evaluation for compliance with computer security certification systems.

Joe Lowry agreed with the topstarter. He pointed out that there is an established procedure in the Unicode consortium to review and standardize new characters, and he would like to help in this matter.

Joe Lowry created a repository on Github , where documents were submitted and edited for submission to the Unicode consortium. He suggested that this repository could be an example for other enthusiasts who want to correctly apply for adding characters to Unicode.

So, Terence Eden and Joe Lowry began to process the application (proposal) in Unicode and developed the font. Bruce Nordman, one of the authors of the original IEEE 1621 standard, took an active part in the project.

In addition to the “Food” symbol mentioned above, Joe Lowry proposed to unite in the general application a group of symbols defined in the IEC 60417 standard (also known as ISO 7000: 2012).

These characters are:

• U + 23FB POWER -
• U + 23FC POWER ON-OFF -
• U + 23FD POWER ON -
• U + 23FE POWER SLEEP -

They decided to add another character from the IEEE 1621 standard.

• U + 2B58 POWER OFF -

After a month of hard work and filling out many forms, the proposal was still able to be sent to the Unicode consortium, and it was accepted for consideration.

To support their proposal, activists opened the site UnicodePowerSymbol.com , where they also published a proposal, argumentation and laid out the news of the campaign for the inclusion of characters in Unicode.

After this, the period of postal correspondence, consultations, telephone conversations, conferences, technical discussions began. The authors of the proposal urged their colleagues that the new symbols comply with all the necessary rules: 1) these are really valid generally accepted symbols; 2) there is convincing evidence of their actual use; 3) they are not burdened with copyright restrictions; 4) members of the Unicode consortium believe that they will be a useful addition to the standard set.

Still, disagreements came to light about the fourth point. Only two characters and everyone liked.

About the character a discussion ensued, because in Unicode there were already several symbols for the “moon” . However, none of them exactly corresponded to the proposed one: either the angle is incorrect, or the semantics of “Sleep mode” was missing. So that eventually accepted.

There were only and . Unicode has a lot of symbols for a straight line and a circle.

After numerous discussions and votes, it was nevertheless decided that none of the existing symbols is suitable for the “Power on” sign, so that has become a new symbol.

But for as a sign of the power off, we found a suitable alternative - a circle (U + 2B58)



A new meaning is simply added to the existing symbol - this is what the authors call “½ symbol” in their sentence.

In February 2014, the symbols were approved by the ISO 10646 Working Group 2 (JTC 1 / SC 2 / WG 2) at WG2 # 62 and recommended the Amendment 2 to ISO / IEC 10646: 2014 .

It took two tedious years of waiting with rare calls and requests from interested parties. Activists were negotiating with the developers of free fonts to persuade them to add new characters when they were accepted. Edited Wikipedia.

And finally came the happy morning of June 22, 2016.

Waking up in the morning, Terenes Eden heard about the release of new Unicode 9.0 specifications. And here they are - our native characters. Two and a half years of work ended in success!

https://twitter.com/edent/status/745507053544710145
Happy developers suggest using an open manual if someone wants to repeat this path and include other characters in the Unicode standard.

For font creators, there are sample fonts with new characters that were developed during the preparation of an application to the Unicode consortium.

• TrueType Font (.ttf)
• SVG Font (.svg)
• Web Open Font Format (.woff)
• Web Open Font Format (.woff2)
• Embedded OpenType (.eot)
• OpenType (.otf)

All users have the right to require developers of their operating systems and software to support new characters. , , , and Unicode standard 9.0!

The table shows HTML Escape codes for 4½ new characters.

Symbol	HTML code	Symbol
Nutrition	& # x23FB;
Power switch	& # x23FC;
Power on	& # x23FD;
Power off	& # x2B58;
Sleep mode	& # x23FE;

On June 22, 2016, they became part of Unicode and can now be freely used everywhere.