This one is a bit difficult. Here’s what I’ve noticed
I only get the combined behavior when displaying the string using print in the ipython terminal. I don’t see the combined behavior when printing in JupyterLab (or plotly annotations as you’ve noticed)
I’ve played around a bit with HTML character encodings in an SVG text editor (https://www.w3schools.com/graphics/tryit.asp?filename=trysvg_text) and nothing I’ve tried in terms of character encodings or fonts has resulted in the combine character that’s displayed in ipython terminal.
Unfortunately I’m honestly not sure what to try from here. If we could find an example of the proper behavior in an SVG image somewhere we could work on tracing that behavior through plotly.js.