PlanarFigure subclasses produce a string representing a measurement together with its unit. Currently, for degrees and square millimeters, "deg" and "mm^2" is used, instead of more nice symbol representations.

It is not easily possible to use these symbols, because they are not part of the 7-Bit-ASCII code which is represented by char * / std::string.

A possible solution to this problem lies in the usage of another string representation supporting UTF-8 or Unicode encoding. std::wstring might be a candidate (we don't have Qt available in MitkExt...)

Another problem is that in QmitkMeasurement, the values are displayed in the RenderWindows corners using a vtkTextActor, which ONLY supports 7-Bit-ASCII and cannot therefore display the symbols at all.