I want to generate high-quality diagrams for a presentation. I’m using Python’s matplotlib to generate the graphics. Unfortunately, the PDF export seems to ignore my font settings.
I tried setting the font both by passing a FontProperties object to the text drawing functions and by setting the option globally. For the record, here is a MWE to reproduce the problem:
import scipy
import matplotlib
matplotlib.use('cairo')
import matplotlib.pylab as pylab
import matplotlib.font_manager as fm
data = scipy.arange(5)
for font in ['Helvetica', 'Gill Sans']:
fig = pylab.figure()
ax = fig.add_subplot(111)
ax.bar(data, data)
ax.set_xticks(data)
ax.set_xticklabels(data, fontproperties = fm.FontProperties(family = font))
pylab.savefig('foo-%s.pdf' % font)
In both cases, the produced output is identical and uses Helvetica (and yes, I do have both fonts installed).
Just to be sure, the following doesn’t help either:
matplotlib.rc('font', family = 'Gill Sans')
Finally, if I replace the backend, instead using the native viewer:
matplotlib.use('MacOSX')
I do get the correct font displayed – but only in the viewer GUI. The PDF output is once again wrong.
To be sure – I can set other fonts – but only other classes of font families: I can set serif fonts or fantasy or monospace. But all sans-serif fonts seem to default to Helvetica.
Basically, #Jouni’s is the right answer but since I still had some trouble getting it to work, here’s my final solution:
#!/usr/bin/env python2.6
import scipy
import matplotlib
matplotlib.use('cairo')
import matplotlib.pylab as pylab
import matplotlib.font_manager as fm
font = fm.FontProperties(
family = 'Gill Sans', fname = '/Library/Fonts/GillSans.ttc')
data = scipy.arange(5)
fig = pylab.figure()
ax = fig.add_subplot(111)
ax.bar(data, data)
ax.set_yticklabels(ax.get_yticks(), fontproperties = font)
ax.set_xticklabels(ax.get_xticks(), fontproperties = font)
pylab.savefig('foo.pdf')
Notice that the font has to be set explicitly using the fontproperties key. Apparently, there’s no rc setting for the fname property (at least I didn’t find it).
Giving a family key in the instantiation of font isn’t strictly necessary here, it will be ignored by the PDF backend.
This code works with the cairo backend only. Using MacOSX won’t work.
The "family" argument and the corresponding rc parameter are not meant to specify the name of the font can actually be used this way. There's an (arguably baroque) CSS-like font selection system that helps the same script work on different computers, selecting the closest font available. The usually recommended way to use e.g. Gill Sans is to add it to the front of the value of the rc parameter font.sans-serif (see sample rc file), and then set font.family to sans-serif.
This can be annoying if the font manager decides for some obscure reason that Gill Sans is not the closest match to your specification. A way to bypass the font selection logic is to use FontProperties(fname='/path/to/font.ttf') (docstring).
In your case, I suspect that the MacOSX backend uses fonts via the operating system's mechanisms and so automatically supports all kinds of fonts, but the pdf backend has its own font support code that doesn't support your version of Gill Sans.
This is an addition to the answers above if you came here for a non-cairo backend.
The pdf-backend of matplotlib does not yet support true type font collections (saved as .ttc files). See this issue.
The currently suggested workaround is to extract the font-of-interest from a .ttc file and save it as a .ttf file. And then use that font in the way described by Konrad Rudolph.
You can use the python-package fonttools to achieve this:
font = TTFont("/System/Library/Fonts/Helvetica.ttc", fontNumber=0)
font.save("Helvetica-regular.ttf")
As far as I can see, it is not possible to make this setting "global" by passing the path to this new .ttf file to the rc. If you are really desperate, you could try to extract all fonts from a .ttc into separate .ttf files, uninstall the .ttc and install the ttfs separately. To have the extracted font side-by-side with the original font from the .ttc, you need to change the font name with tools like FontForge. I haven't tested this, though.
Check if you are rendering the text with LaTeX, i.e., if text.usetex is set to True. Because LaTeX rendering only supports a few fonts, it largely ignores/overwrites your other fonts settings. This might be the cause.
Related
I have to make a figure in python. I need it to use the font Palatino. I downloaded the font here. I placed it under *\matplotlib\mpl-data\fonts\ttf (which turned out to be useless since I had to provide full path to make it work).
Using the following lines allows me to use the font:
prop = fm.FontProperties(fname='C:/Users/MyPC/pyApp/venv/Lib/site-packages/matplotlib/mpl-data/fonts/ttf/Palatino-Roman.ttf')
mpl.rcParams['font.family'] = prop.get_name()
Yay.
Now when I want to use Latex in matplotlib,
rc('text',usetex=True)
the font is now not the one I want. I tried to follow the official page about that and instead use:
rc('font',**{'family':'serif','serif':['Palatino']})
rc('text', usetex=True)
but I cannot see any difference. I tried all possibilities and it looks like the same font.
What am I doing wrong? Perhaps its the latex side that's lacking the required font package...
You can load any latex packages when using rc('text',usetex=True)
You can add this in your code:
plt.rcParams['text.latex.preamble'] = [r'\usepackage{palatino, mathpazo}']
In matplotlib, one can easily use latex script to label axes, or write legends or any other text. But is there a way to use new fonts such as 'script-r' in matplotlib? In the following code, I am labelling the axes using latex fonts.
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
tmax=10
h=0.01
number_of_realizations=6
for n in range(number_of_realizations):
xpos1=0
xvel1=0
xlist=[]
tlist=[]
t=0
while t<tmax:
xlist.append(xpos1)
tlist.append(t)
xvel1=np.random.normal(loc=0.0, scale=1.0, size=None)
xpos2=xpos1+(h**0.5)*xvel1 # update position at time t
xpos1=xpos2
t=t+h
plt.plot(tlist, xlist)
plt.xlabel(r'$ t$', fontsize=50)
plt.ylabel(r'$r$', fontsize=50)
plt.title('Brownian motion', fontsize=20)
plt.show()
It produces the following figure
But I want 'script-r' in place of normal 'r'.
In latex one has to add the following lines in preamble to render 'script-r'
\DeclareFontFamily{T1}{calligra}{}
\DeclareFontShape{T1}{calligra}{m}{n}{<->s*[2.2]callig15}{}
\DeclareRobustCommand{\sr}{%
\mspace{-2mu}%
\text{\usefont{T1}{calligra}{m}{n}r\/}%
\mspace{2mu}%
}
I don't understand how to do this in matplotlib. Any help is appreciated.
Matplotlib uses it's own hand-rolled (pure Python) implementation of TeX to do all of the math text stuff, so you absolutely cannot assume that what works in standard LaTeX will work with Matplotlib. That being said, here's how you do it:
Install the calligra font so that Matplotlib can see it, then rebuild the font cache.
Lots of other threads deal with how to do this, I'm not going to go into detail, but here's some reference:
Use a font installed in a random spot on your filesystem.
How to install a new font into the Matplotlib managed font cache.
List all fonts currently known to your install of Matplotlib.
Replace one of Matplotlib's TeX font families with your font of choice.
Here's a function I wrote a while ago that reliably does that:
import matplotlib
def setMathtextFont(fontName='Helvetica', texFontFamilies=None):
texFontFamilies = ['it','rm','tt','bf','cal','sf'] if texFontFamilies is None else texFontFamilies
matplotlib.rcParams.update({'mathtext.fontset': 'custom'})
for texFontFamily in texFontFamilies:
matplotlib.rcParams.update({('mathtext.%s' % texFontFamily): fontName})
For you, a good way to use the function would be to replace the font used by \mathcal with calligra:
setMathtextFont('calligra', ['cal'])
Label your plots, for example, r'$\mathcal{foo}$', and the contents of the \math<whatever> macro should show up in the desired font.
Here's how you'd change your label-making code:
plt.ylabel(r'$\mathcal{r}$', fontsize=50)
and that should do it.
For a webapp I need a way to prevent that a browser falls back to another font if my web font doesn't include a character. It seems the only way to do this is to add another font to the fontstack which includes "all" possible characters 1.
There are already existing fallback fonts, but those are more debug helpers as they show the codepoint as number, therefore they are much to heavy (>2MB).
The fallback font for my usecase should just show something like a box to signal a missing character.
My idea was to generate a simple font with only one glyph and apply a feature file which will replace all glyphs with this one.
My script for fontforge:
import fontforge
import fontTools.feaLib.builder as feaLibBuilder
from fontTools.ttLib import TTFont
font_name = 'maeh.ttf'
font = fontforge.font()
glyph = font.createChar(33, "theone")
pen = glyph.glyphPen()
pen.moveTo((100,100))
pen.lineTo((100,500))
pen.lineTo((500,500))
pen.lineTo((500,100))
pen.closePath()
for i in range(34, 99):
glyph = font.createChar(i)
glyph.width=10
font.cidConvertTo('Adobe', 'Identity', 0) # doesn't make a difference
font.generate(font_name)
font = TTFont(font_name)
feaLibBuilder.addOpenTypeFeatures(font, 'fallback.fea')
font.save("fea_"+font_name)
My feature file:
languagesystem DFLT dflt;
#all=[\00035-\00039];
##all=[A-Z] this works
feature liga {
sub #all by theone;
} liga;
But the above results in a
KeyError: ('cid00037', 'SingleSubst[0]', 'Lookup[0]', 'LookupList')
with changing numbers for cid00037.
If I use the out commented A-Z from the Feature file it works, so this approach doesn't seem to be completely wrong.
Why can't fonttools find the glyphs if I specify the range in CID notation?
Is there another way to crate a class for the OpenType feature file which includes all glyphs?
While working on the above problem, somebody hinted me to the Adobe NotDef font, which is pretty much what I was looking for. For some reason I wasn't able to convert the .otf of the Adobe NotDef to woff or woff2 with fontforge. Also all the online tools to create the web font files like fontsquirrel failed. To create the woff file I used sfnt2woff from the woff-tools package. For the woff2 file I used https://github.com/google/woff2.
I'm trying to use the font "Heuristica" in my matplotlib plots, but it won't show up.
I defined "Heuristica" on the first spot in the rcParameter font.serif --> no result
I changed font.family to "Heuristica" and got the message
findfont: FontFamily not found
that got me thinking, because Heuristica is installed and I can access it from other software without problems. So I used the fontManager and did:
import pylab as pl
la = pl.matplotlib.font_manager.FontManager()
lu = pl.matplotlib.font_manager.FontProperties(family = 'Heuristica')
la.findfont(lu)
and got:
Out[7]: 'C:\\Windows\\Fonts\\Heuristica-Regular.otf'
So obviously Heuristica can be found.
I looked up the available ttf-Fonts (How can i get list of font family(or Name of Font) in matplotlib) but Heuristica is not in this list.
I'd be glad about any help.
Well, mdboom solved the problem over at github, all the credit belongs to him:
When you add new fonts to your system, you need to delete your fontList.cache file in order for matplotlib to find them.
The reason it works on lines 4/5 in your example is because you are creating a FontManager from scratch (which goes out to the filesystem and hunts down all the fonts). Internally, when matplotlib later does its own font lookup, it is using a FontManager that has been loaded from a cache on disk in the fontList.cache file.
Long term, we have plans to switch to using the font lookup mechanisms of the OS to get around this problem, (see MEP14), but in the meantime, you'll need to remove the fontList.cache file everytime you want matplotlib to discover new fonts.
The file fontList.cache is located at your Userfolder --> .matplotlib/fontList.cache, for Windows that would normally be C:\Users\yourUsername\.matplotlib\fontList.cache
For some versions of Matplotlib, it may be necessary to clear the LRU cache of _get_fontconfig_fonts() (next to removing the fontList.cache file).
fm = matplotlib.font_manager
fm._get_fontconfig_fonts.cache_clear()
This function is responsible for calling, and caching, fc-list on a Linux/Unix system. If your font appears in fc-list, and not in Matplotlib's fonts, even after removing the fontList.cache file, this may be the culprit.
I want to use this font in matplotlib plotting, but I can not find out the name. Does anyone know?
This figure is got by IDL plotting on Mac OS (10.9) like:
filename = 'name.eps'
myDevice = !D.NAME
SET_PLOT,'ps'
DEVICE,DECOMPOSED=1,ENCAPSULATED=1,/COLOR,FILENAME=filename
......
DEVICE, /CLOSE
SET_PLOT, myDevice
I'm not a font expert, but this looks a lot to me like the font that was used with pen plotters. Looking around for "pen plotter font", turns up "Hershey Vector Font", which looks quite close.
The font is indeed a Hershey vector font: Hershey Simplex Light. This user on Github has the font definition files (otf) that you can copy/clone into your system and set as the default fonts in your matplotlibrc. Not all the characters are included, but you can use fontforge to open the otf and/or sfd files and merge/copy/create missing glyphs.
(updated in 2022)
I think this font is a kind of vector font belonging to the Hershey family.
Here is a set of TTF fonts that are based on the Hershey font https://github.com/yangcht/Hershey_font_TTF.
You can download them and load them when you make plots.