Set OpenType features for default plot font #22
Description
I've just tried out the new OpenType feature support, appears to work nicely on
{'python': '3.7.6 (default, Dec 30 2019, 19:38:28) \n[Clang 11.0.0 (clang-1100.0.33.16)]', 'mplcairo': '0.2.post33+g4b14de1.d20200227', 'matplotlib': '3.1.1', 'cairo': '1.16.0', 'freetype': '2.10.1', 'pybind11': '2.3.0', 'raqm': '0.7.0'}
However, since the syntax isn't integrated with font_manager (which of course would need matplotlib support), it seems like it would be extremely tedious to set properties for default fonts (axes/…) this way – is there a good solution for this?
Activity
dnadlinger commented on Feb 27, 2020
(I've just patched _util.cpp for now to set the features I want by default, as they are silently ignored for fonts that don't have them anyway.)
anntzer commented on Feb 27, 2020
Font selection in mpl is quite a mess (to be fair it's a complicated topic and what's already present is already a lot of work); see e.g. matplotlib/matplotlib#10249 for some issues and matplotlib/matplotlib#16203 for some work on it; I'm sure we could use more hands working on it :)
In other words: no, but contributions are welcome, and I think it should go to mpl rather than here (effectively the syntax here is just exploiting the fact that raw paths are completely bypassing the font selection system).
For a concrete proposal: in #10249 I propose to switch from fontconfig fontspec strings to CSS fontspec strings (after all FontProperties are already modeled based on CSS fonts). CSS also supports https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/font-feature-settings so it may be possible to add them to FontProperties and then to fontspec strings.
anntzer commented on May 3, 2020
I think there isn't anything to be done on mplcairo's side (well, at least until FontProperties get font-feature-settings support) and the work to be done can be tracked in matplotlib/matplotlib#16566 (comment).