6 of 8 Update post to add another option and list them in a table.

Degree symbol

Standard Mathjax does not yet support a dedicated degree symbol, so here are some of the ways to try and emulate one :

$$\begin{array} \\ \text{45^\text{o}} & \text{renders as} & 45^\text{o} \\ \text{45^o} & \text{renders as} & 45^o \\ \text{45^\circ} & \text{renders as} & 45^\circ \\ % % Use the following line as a template for additional entries % % \text{} & \text{renders as} & \\ \end{array}$$

The degree symbol for angles is not ^\circ. Although many people use this notation, the result looks quite different from the canonical degree symbol shipped with the font:

If your keyboard doesn't have a ° key, feel free to copy from this post here, or follow these suggestions.

Note that comments below indicate that on some configurations at least, ° renders inferior to ^\circ. And I recently had a post of mine edited just for the sake of turning ° into ^\circ, indicating that someone felt rather strongly about this. So the suggestion above does seem somewhat controversial at the moment. I maintain that from a semantic point of view, ° is superior to ^\circ, and if the rendering suffers from this, then it's a bug in MathJax. After all, LaTeX offers a proper degree symbol in the tex companion fonts, indicating that someone there, too, decided that ^\circ is not perfect. But if things are broken now, I can't fault people from pragmatically sticking with the rendering they prefer. Personally I prefer semantics, also for the sake of screen readers.

Usepackage

Commonly in Latex you can \usepackage{gensymb}' to get the\degree` symbol, however on Stackexchange this is not an option. Note that even if you can do this it will typically affect the entire page, which may have side effects for other users. So don't rely on this approach.

 answered Feb 17 '15 at 20:24 MvG 30.4k1323