One more variation on what Ryo shows here. Using system fonts, and I've also just tested this with a couple of them, the html-character specifiers seem to work well. This gives a good result:
set text arial
use coads_climatology
plot/set/y=0/L=1 sst
ppl xfor(f5.1,''<°>'')
ppl plot
(but only with an F5.1 numeric spec; other format specs show the
problem with spacing that Ryo ran into.)
Dear Ansley and Billy,
Thank you for your help! Here I summarize what I've found so far.
1. "ppl xfor,(i5,''@im09'')" works with "set text/font=HERSHEY", which is Ferret's native font.
2. With system fonts (but I have tried just one), the number and the text overlap! So, something like
ppl xfor,(i5,''___°'')
may kind of work if you replace the underscore "_" characters with non-visible white space characters from unicode (untested). I've just tested this idea with the underscores.
3. "cancel mode long_label" does disable "E" and "W" but also disables degrees symbols:
yes? set data coads_climatology
yes? cancel mode long_tabel
yes? fill/L=1 SST
In this case, Ferret stops its special treatment of longitude axes. So, you still need to add degrees symbols by yourself.
Cheers,
Ryo-----------------Out of curiosity, I checked what gfortran does with unicode characters. These days, unicode characters are nothing to worry about in modern languages. So, this program
program try
write(*,"(I5, '°')") 3
end program try
produced 3° on my screen.