Degree symbol not rendering properly on plot

Q&A PyGMT Q&A
1

I’ve tried to plot the degree symbol in a text field using the following two lines:

fig.text(text=str(inc) + "u"8\u00b0"", x = text_long, y = text_lat, angle = tilt)

and

    fig.text(text=str(inc) + chr(176), x = text_long, y = text_lat, angle = tilt)

Neither renders the symbol properly, which shows up as such:

erroneousplot
erroneousplot130×106 2.39 KB

Anybody have any idea if there’s a way to resolve this and properly plot a degree symbol in figure text?

2

I’ve got the same problem. I tried u"\N{DEGREE SIGN}" as well as octal codes for different encodings, but did not get it to work. Might be a bug in PyGMT?

3

Hello @geofan,

your issue is probably related to Better support of non-ASCII characters in PyGMT arguments · Issue #2204 · GenericMappingTools/pygmt (github.com).

Beside using the corresponding octal code (\260, please not the addional \ in the code example below), you can plot the degree symbol in GMT / PyGMT using @.

Code example:

import pygmt

fig = pygmt.Figure()

fig.basemap(
    region=[-1, 1, -1, 1],
    projection="X2c",
    frame="a1f0.5g1",
)

fig.text(
    text="42\\260",  # using octal code, please not the addional "\"
    # text="42@.",
    x=0,
    y=0,
)

fig.show()
#fig.savefig(fname="degree_sign_gmt.png")

Output figure:

degree_sign_gmt
degree_sign_gmt300×296 1001 Bytes

4

Thanks Yvonne, that worked like a charm!