simple text in matplotlib

This post is a "note to myself" about fonts and text using matplotlib. It can be hard to remember things like what is a FontProperties object and what kind of object is a font_dict, so here is a little example. It shows how to get (1) the default font with italics, (2) a default font in a particular "family"---sans-serif, (3) and (4) two named fonts and (5) a font loaded from a particular .ttf file. Notice that in (4) we do not observe the desired response to changing the 'weight'---I'm not sure why yet.

The second figure shows a change in the font using rc. It looks nice, takes several seconds to draw, and does not give the desired italics. They're all here as a reference. Perhaps they'll be of some use to you as well.


output:

:family=Arial:style=normal:variant=normal:weight=normal:stretch=normal:file=/Library/Fonts/Arial Italic.ttf:size=12.0

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt import matplotlib.font_manager as fm # can take a 'fontdict', Python dictionary x,y = 0.1,0.1 fd = { 'fontsize':24, 'style':'italic', 'va':'center', 'ha':'left' } plt.text(x,y,'1. text ' + 'default',**fd) fd['family'] = 'sans-serif' y += 0.1 plt.text(x,y,'1. text ' + 'sans-serif',**fd) L = ['Arial','Helvetica'] for i,n in enumerate(L): fd['fontname'] = n y += 0.1 plt.text(x,y,str(i+2) + '. text ' + n,**fd) fd['weight'] = 1000 y += 0.1 plt.text(x,y,'4. text--not properly bolded',**fd) fp = fm.FontProperties(family='Arial', fname='/Library/Fonts/Arial Italic.ttf') print fp y += 0.1 plt.text(x,y,'5. text Arial--named', fontsize=24, fontproperties=fp) ax = plt.axes() ax.xaxis.set_visible(False) ax.yaxis.set_visible(False) plt.savefig('example.png')

from matplotlib import rc import matplotlib.pyplot as plt x,y = 0.1,0.1 rc('font',**{'family':'sans-serif', 'sans-serif':['Helvetica'], 'style':'italic', 'size':24 }) rc('text', usetex=True) y += 0.1 plt.text(x,y,'text using rc--not properly italic') ax = plt.axes() ax.xaxis.set_visible(False) ax.yaxis.set_visible(False) plt.savefig('example.png')