On 08/22/2010 10:00 PM, Daniel Hyams wrote:
I am searching for advice on how to handle selecting a specific font,
and using that in a matplotlib figure. As a background, the font will
be picked through the wx.FontDialog (common font dialog) provided by
wxPython. So, what I will have is the font face (Arial, Times New
Roman, Algerian, etc. etc.), the weight, the style (italic, normal)
and the point size. All I want to do is create a matplotlib font that
matches this, and use it in the plot. My first try was this:
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import matplotlib.font_manager as fm
# this does not work. The title font is wrong.
the_font = 'Century Schoolbook'
fp = fm.FontProperties()
fp.set_name(the_font)
fp.set_size(24)
plt.title('The Title that should be in Century
Schoolbook',fontproperties=fp)
print fp
plt.show()
But that didn't work. I know that "Century Schoolbook" is not really
a font family, but in the docs it says that you can list a font there.
On my RHEL5 system (at least), the full name of that font is "Century
Schoolbook L". You do, of course, have to match the font name exactly.
You may want to experiment with using wx.Font.GetFaceName vs.
wx.Font.GetFamilyString from the font chooser dialog and see if either
returns the correct result.
You can see the list of fonts that matplotlib found on your system by doing:
from matplotlib import font_manager
font_manager.fontManager.ttflist
(This is not a public API -- but may help with debugging the issue here).
Is the font you are hoping to match with in that list?
Another thing you may want to try is deleting matplotlib's font cache,
in case this font was installed after matplotlib was first run on your
system. It is is in a file "fontList.cache" and lives in the user data
area (can't remember the exact location of this on Windows off hand).
The following does work, if I manually set the TrueType file explicitly:
fp = fm.FontProperties()
fp.set_file('c:\\Windows\Fonts\CENSCBK.TTF')
fp.set_size(24)
print fp
plt.title('The Title that is in Century Schoolbook',fontproperties=fp)
plt.show()
So I guess the question is....how does one accomplish this, portably?
I don't quite understand the ins and outs of fonts.....
p.s.
I did take a stab at creating a mapping between the font names /
weights / styles like this:
all_fontfiles = fm.win32InstalledFonts()
allfonts = fm.createFontList(all_fontfiles)
fontdict = {}
for f in allfonts:
fontdict[(f.name <http://f.name>,f.style,f.weight)] = f.fname
And I think I can get this to work, because this maps me to a TTF file
for any name, style, and weight combination. But this seemed awfully
hacky, and I don't know what problems I'll run into on other platforms
(obviously, I would have get all_fontfiles above differently on each
platform). If this is the only way to do it, I guess that's OK, but I
thought that surely there was a better way.
That's basically a stricter way of doing what the matplotlib code
already does. The matplotlib lookup is actually smarter because it
handles approximate "nearest neighbor" matches. I think the problem is
more likely one of the above (an inexact name match or an out-of-date
font cache).
Mike
--
Michael Droettboom
Science Software Branch
Space Telescope Science Institute
Baltimore, Maryland, USA
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