Re: better glyph for U+00B0 (DEGREE SIGN)

[Gavin Smith]

On Sat, Nov 12, 2022 at 10:18:31PM +0000, Werner LEMBERG wrote:
> LilyPond's input encoding is UTF-8; markup strings must be thus
> emitted as UTF-8, too.  Its Texinfo documentation extracts code
> snippets from master files (using the `lilypond-book` script),
> compiles them for graphical output, and shows the source code at the
> same time.   Example:
> 
> ```
> \markup {
>   default
>   \hspace #2
>   \rotate #45
>   \line {
>     rotated 45°
>   }
> }
> ```

Since you have a real use case here, and the case of someone trying
to use a degree sign without the EC font is only hypothetical, I have
instated your proposed definition for \textdegree.

I found that copying and pasting produced an extra space before
the degree sign, like 45 °.  The output in the PDF file corresponding
to 45° was

[(45)]TJ/F126 10.9589 Tf 10.909 0 Td [(\260)]TJ

(produced using \pdfcompresslevel0) although I didn't/couldn't
investigate further.  It may depend on the PDF reader.

I did investigate if something could be done inside the PDF output
to make the copiable text differ from the displayed text, using
a feature called ActualText (available in PDF standard from version 1.5
onwards), but it seemed far more trouble than it was worth.