Proposal to Add the IEC 60417-5009 Power Button Symbol to Unicode

Joe Loughry, originally 1st December 2013.

The IEC 60417-5009 “Stand-by” Symbol

On 1 December 2013, Terence Eden posed a question to Hacker News asking why Unicode lacks the international symbol that appears on power buttons. After searching for a while, I learnt he was right — in fact, Unicode lacks all of the following symbols:¹

IEC 60417-5007	IEC 60417-5008	IEC 60417-5009	IEC 60417-5010	IEEE 1621
“ON” (power)	“OFF” (power)	“Stand-by”	“ON”/“OFF” (push-push)	“Stand-by”
Click on any image for SVG.

Clearly these would be useful to anyone writing technical or user manuals. In fact, for electronically publishing documentation, it is crucial to have symbols defined in Unicode because it makes them searchable in text.

How to Add Symbols to Unicode

The Unicode Consortium has a procedure for submitting character proposals. None of the above symbols appear in the pipeline of proposed new symbols, so let's do it!

There are a few crescent moon symbols in Unicode already: the 🌙 CRESCENT MOON (U+1F319), ☽ FIRST QUARTER MOON (U+263D), and ☾ LAST QUARTER MOON (U+263E) symbols, but none of them are exactly like the IEEE 1621 symbol; U+1F319 is closest, but faces the opposite direction.

Getting Access to the “Official” Symbols

IEC charges 400 Swiss Francs (currently $440 USD) for their standard.²   IEEE charges $58 for the IEEE 1621 standard.³

I want to verify the specifications for each symbol shown above in IEEE 1621-2004 and IEC 61417, which is also ISO 7000:2012, then translate those into whatever form of description is required by Unicode.

The ISO standard is free⁴, so if we can use that, we will.

Copyright

Alex Stapleton in this conversation on Twitter checked the introduction of IEC 60417 for copyright information and vector drawings of the symbols.

Writing the Proposal

1. See if I can get the IEC and IEEE standards through my school.

2. If not, I'll buy them—the cost of the IEEE standard is reasonable and there is some indication that the IEC standard can be got for less without a yearly fee.

3. Verify that the Wikipedia symbols shown above are compliant with the specifications in the standards.

4. Research on the IEC web site to find the right format in which to write a proposal.

5. Determine the “character properties” like name, bidirectional class, upper and lowercase mapping, linebreaking behaviour, and collation order.

6. Make TrueType and PostScript fonts.

7. File the proposal at least seven days in advance of the next quarterly meeting of the Unicode Technical Committee (UTC).

8. If accepted, submit a “Show HN” post on HN telling how it was done.

Notes

• a font editor that speaks SVG, PostScript, and TrueType is http://fontforge.org/

• This article on Stack Overflow suggests using Python and TTX to generate TrueType fonts from SVG.

References

1. “Power symbol” Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_symbol#Definitions

2. International Electrotechnical Commission. Graphical symbols for use on equipment. IEC 60417, 2005.

3. IEEE Standards Association. IEEE Standard for User Interface Elements in Power Control of Electronic Devices Employed in Office/Consumer Environments. IEEE Standard 1621-2004.

4. International Organisation for Standardisation. Graphical symbols for use on equipment -- Registered symbols. ISO 7000:2012.