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Better document how to set font #5941
Description
Hello,
The title says it all. If you will see in this Jupyter notebook, the text in the axes appears as undefined squares, whereas the string is accurately displayed elsewhere.
I'm using the latest release of matplotlib, installed today, on Python 3.4.3 on Windows 7.
Activity
mdboom commented on Jan 28, 2016
Matplotlib uses its own basic text layout algorithm, rather than something like Pango, which can handle internationalized text. This is the main purpose of MEP14 -- to get this working properly, but it will be a great deal of work.
The other issue you are running into is that the default font that ships with matplotlib, "Bitstream Vera" does not have any non-European characters. matplotlib 2.0 will replace this font with "Deja Vu", which has a much broader character set, but that still won't help if the language requires specialized layout.
One possible workaround is to set the rcParam usetex=True if you have a working xetex or luatex installation.
In the meantime, this is a long-known bug that we haven't been able to find the time or resources to resolve.
shirish93 commented on Jan 28, 2016
Thank you for the quick turnaround! Is there something I can do to help?
tacaswell commented on Jan 29, 2016
I think you can change the default font to one that contains the code-points you need.
mdboom commented on Apr 11, 2016
With 2.0 we have more character coverage -- we're not doing any fancy text layout, but that's hopefully coming in the future.
github-actions commented on Mar 21, 2023
This issue has been marked "inactive" because it has been 365 days since the last comment. If this issue is still present in recent Matplotlib releases, or the feature request is still wanted, please leave a comment and this label will be removed. If there are no updates in another 30 days, this issue will be automatically closed, but you are free to re-open or create a new issue if needed. We value issue reports, and this procedure is meant to help us resurface and prioritize issues that have not been addressed yet, not make them disappear. Thanks for your help!
jklymak commented on Mar 21, 2023
I think it's safe to close this with the newer font handling documentation.