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Occasionally I've seen the symbol "plus or minus" written in fractional form, like this:

plus or minus

Is there a Unicode character for this?

Note: I already know about the standard "plus-minus sign" symbol, but it won't work in this context. I'm specifically looking for a version with the fraction bar.

andrewtc
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    Yes. ± http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/b1/index.htm – Matt Ball Aug 07 '13 at 04:43
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    This question appears to be off-topic because it is about finding a Unicode character. – Matt Ball Aug 07 '13 at 04:43
  • In which forum should I post this, though? There's no Stack Exchange site for typography. :/ – andrewtc Aug 07 '13 at 04:50
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    Matt: That's assuming that there is a single character for that and that there are no other means of getting that glyph. That assumption may not be valid and I doubt a search engine might turn up my solution. – Joey Aug 07 '13 at 05:06
  • As asked, the question is off-topic here (might be suitable for SuperUser). But the question about *producing* the form may be about programming. – Jukka K. Korpela Aug 07 '13 at 06:52
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    This seems to me like an alternative glyph for ±, in which case the question would be “is there a font that renders ± with a slash”? – bobince Aug 07 '13 at 09:10
  • If [this other question](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1384380/is-there-a-unicode-glyph-that-looks-like-a-key-icon?lq=1) was closed, so should this one. – Ciro Santilli OurBigBook.com Jan 31 '14 at 16:12

5 Answers5

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You can approximate it to some extent with a superscript plus (U+207A), a division slash (U+2215) and a subscript minus (U+208B):

⁺∕₋

However, it requires font support to get right. Especially the super- and subscript +/− are not available in most fonts, so it might just render horribly.

For reference, that's how it looks for me (better than five years ago, but still somewhat broken):

enter image description here

However, using Cambria Math in Word 2010 it looks like this:

enter image description here

Which probably is exactly how it should look like (follows the same typesetting rules as fractions).

Joey
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  • Looks better for me than for you ;-) – Joachim Breitner Dec 25 '13 at 18:32
  • ⁺∕₋ is definitely the way to go. HTML: `⁺∕₋` links: http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/207a/index.htm http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/2215/index.htm http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/208b/index.htm – travis Feb 16 '16 at 18:10
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    Works great. Swift: `let plusMinus = "\u{207A}\u{2215}\u{208B}"` renders nice with the default font in a`UILabel`. – Murray Sagal May 28 '18 at 18:23
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This is the only one I have seen in unicode (plus over minus):

±

HTML/XML Character reference:

±

HTML Named Entity:

±

This symbol is used to indicate the precision of an approximation.

Joey
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gillytech
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    It's not only used for precision of an approximation. Way back in school we learned a simple formula for the roots of a quadratic function which was x₁₂ = p/2 ± √(p^2/4 - q), where the ± simply indicates two possible choices to make to arrive at two possible results. – Joey Aug 07 '13 at 04:54
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    The *correct* use of “±”, by international standards, is to denote two numbers, as in @Joey’s example. Its use to indicate assumed precision or accuracy of an approximation is common but incorrect. It can be used to express tolerances, since tolerances are expressed by two numbers. – Jukka K. Korpela Aug 07 '13 at 06:50
  • Marking this as the accepted answer, since the original question is asking for a single Unicode code point. The other answers that show how to approximate the desired symbol are very useful, though! – andrewtc Jul 24 '18 at 20:06
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You mean like ± (U+00B1 / "\x00b1")?

Edit: speaking specifically to a design which uses a solidus, the best I could find was ⁺⁄₋ which is U+207a (superscript plus sign) U+2044 (fraction slash) U+208b (subscript minus). The fraction slash has negative kerning in some fonts, which causes the appearance of composition. See this JSFiddle for an example of how this works with a larger font size.

<div style="font-size:20em;">&#x207a;&#x2044;&#x208b;</div>

enter image description here

Mitch
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5

+⁄−

<sup>+</sup>&#8260;<sub>&#8722;</sub>

dirkdirk
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0

In UTF-8: 0xC2 0xB1

For other encodings see: http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/b1/index.htm

Akinakes
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