You can make the use of tex automatic by setting text.usetex to True
in your rc file
### TEXT
# text properties used by text.Text. See
# http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/matplotlib.text.html for more
# information on text properties
text.color : black
text.usetex : True # use
I had postscript problems on matplotlib 0.83.2 with the fonts. If my
plot had text in it, the ps file wouldn't convert to pdf. It had an
error.
Robert Kern on the matplotlib-users mailing list had a work around.
That is use tex fonts.
This worked for me. I installed the latest version of te
