We have a certain style of dimensions with a prefix alt+273 ◄ and suffix alt+272 ►. This is to annotate internal room dimensions for drawings to interest potential customers.

Our contractor however prefers to use Lucida Sans instead of Arial, and Lucida Sans only has an 8 bit character set in contradiction to Arial (which contains all Unicode characters). This renders our prefix and suffix useless since they are Unicode, and not standard ASCII..
When we try to use Lucida Sans Unicode the dimensions look all messed up. We have yet to find a way to solve this.
It would also help if we would have more control over our tick marks. Perhaps that would offer a way out if it would work anything like section heads?

Thoughts, please?