Latin-1 non ASCII symbol on Mono Linux is not displayed

Question

Our winforms software extensively using ° - degree symbol. Which is &deg or &#176 in ISO/IEC 8859-1 (also known as Latin-1).

There is no problem with the symbol on .NET Windows for decent number of fonts (We use about 5 fonts in app). There is no problem with ° on Linux in general. I can see it in Gtk applications, even can input °, say, in console if typing ctrl+shift+u-b-0, but not in our Mono application.

When we run the software under Mono on Linux (Ubuntu 12.10) the degree symbols are not displayed (black question chars are rendered instead).

Is there any way to configure mono or our software (select fonts?) to have the symbols shown?

P.S. The software is for equipment for precision angle measurement. Degree symbol for the software is like dollar symbol for a bank.

Update (For commenters). We can theoretically replace each ° with picture. It is possible, the same as Man on Mars is possible. But before we start this tedious work, my idea was to ask on stackoverflow, because maybe we can just tweak something in Mono (as usual with mono). What is wrong with that?

Answer 1

I compiled an application on Ubuntu 12.10 with Mono 2.10.8.1 and the degree symbol appears fine in PropertyGrid and Label controls. The default font appears to be DejaVu Sans, so you might want to consider using that.