[Matplotlib-users] matplotlib figures missing text

[Andre' Walker-L. <wal...@gm...>]

Hi All,

I am having two slight irritating issues making figures with matplotlib (and have not found a solution with Google)

I am running the Enthought 6.2 distribution (python 2.6, matplotlib 0.99.3, ipython 0.10, ...) which is installed as a Framework on a Mac OSX 10.6 platform.  

I currently am using (matplotlibrc file)

backend      : macosx   (I find the same issues with WXAgg and TkAgg as well)
...
text.usetex         : true #use latex for all text handling


Both problems began with my Enthought distribution (but for reasons I will spare you, I don't want to switch to a different installation if possible, except upgrade Enthought).


Problem 1:
With all my old installations, which existed on previous Mac OSX version (10.5), I did not need to set

text.usetex         : true #use latex for all text handling

My text rendering worked fine.  But with the Enthought version, for some reason, I got fatal errors.  So I switched to having latex render all text.  This wasn't a big deal, and it has been a while, so I don't have the error logs anymore.  Just wondering if anyone else experienced this, and understands why?


Problem 2: (I believe unrelated to 1)

I use the annotate command to add text to my figures, displaying analysis results.

Frequently, when I save the figure as a PDF, these annotated texts do not appear in the saved PDF.  I find that if I fiddle with the matplotlib gui figure-window, adjusting the size on my screen, then I can eventually get the saved PDF to contain this text.  But this gets very annoying quickly, as almost never is the default size the one needed to properly capture the text in the saved figure, and it requires lots of fine-tuning with trial and error.

If I instead save as PNG, I almost never have this problem (maybe never).


Infrequently, the text doesn't even display in the gui window, until I fiddle with the size of the window.

In both cases, NO errors are produced.  My script which does the analysis and produces the figures uses

from pylab import *

but otherwise no "*" imports.


My old Fink installation doesn't have this problem - but it was moved from my old Mac OSX 10.5 system, and there are some issues with the upgrade to Mac OSX 10.6, which lead me to need to just re-install everything fresh on the 10.6 OS.


I am not sure if this problem is specific to Enthought's distribution (the latex tex rendering problem made me suspect this) or is just some bizarre Mac problem or ???


So, does anyone out there have the same or similar problem?  And better yet, understand why and how to fix?


Thanks,

Andre