Currently, there are two Unicode codepoints for symbols representing the Earth, used mainly in historical publications and contexts: U+2641 (
http://unicode.org/cldr/utility/character.jsp?a=2641) and U+1F728 (
http://unicode.org/cldr/utility/character.jsp?a=1F728;
http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/1f728/index.htm)
An alternate character to the second one, used to my knowledge in the 18th and 19th centuries, was a circle with an equator line only. See for example this page from an 1872 high-school astronomy text (reference in the Wikipedia article on astronomical symbols):
http://books.google.com/books?id=XksAAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA32#v=onepage&q&f=false, where "a sphere and its equator" is given as one of the two symbols. Benjamin Franklin also used this symbol in
Poor Richard's Almanac, for example:
http://public.gettysburg.edu/~tshannon/his341/pra53293.htm (a little hard to see but starting 9 lines from the top of the right-hand page).
There are numerous glyphs in Unicode that look similar, notably capital '0' with a median bar, Greek capital theta, etc., but nothing I see that is a pure circle with a media bar (in U+29B5 it extends to the sides).
Would it be worth working up a proposal for this symbol?
David Sewell
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