Font Forum

In the next release of Unicode in June there are four characters which have been added to the Miscellaneous Technical block, two of these are the on/off power symbols from IEC 5009 and IEC 5010, these are at $23FB and $23FC.

It is unlikely at this late stage that the Unicode committee will change it's mind about putting these characters in or their codepoints.

I have implemented these characters and they come up bright red in Font Creator because they are not yet part of the standard, however they seem to work fine in the font.

Is there any reason, either practical or philosophical why I shouldn't implement these characters at these codepoints?

There's no problem with encoding them, but as it says on the Unicode Proposals Page:

Caution: Use of proposed or accepted characters is at implementers' own risk; the repertoire, names and allocation of the characters may change before they are finally published in the Unicode Standard.

If you wish to prevent the red warnings you can manually edit UnicodeData.txt (Tools, Options, Advanced, Copy Data to User Data Folder, then Open User Data Folder to find the Unicode folder and the text file).

Close FontCreator, edit the text file by copy/paste a couple of lines, and change the code points and glyph names. This data file is used by FontCreator to populate dialogues such as the Insert Character dialogue or the Glyph Properties dialogue).
I see from the Unicode Proposals page that the names for 23FB-23FF will be:

23FB = POWER SYMBOL
23FC = POWER ON-OFF SYMBOL
23FD = POWER ON SYMBOL
23FE = POWER SLEEP SYMBOL
23FF = OBSERVER EYE SYMBOL

I knew about the first four but not the $23FF Observer Eye Symbol.

It just caught me by surprise, I have been using Font Creator for almost a year now and this is the first time a character has been highlighted in red. It didn't take me long to figure out why though.

If the allocations change between now and June I will just change the codepoints or put them in the private use area.

PJMiller wrote:I knew about the first four but not the $23FF Observer Eye Symbol.

The last one apparently hasn't progressed quite as far through the Pipeline.

It is a good symbol to have. I have got an 'Eye of the Observer' diagram on Inkscape as a .SVG file. I occasionally use it in diagrams for explaining things to students.