We have two modes to render latex -- one is native TeX layout and uses
latex and dvipng, and is superior if you need all of TeX's
capabilities (eg an eqnarray), but the fonts are suboptimal.  The
other is mathtext, which will cover 98% of most users' math needs,
does not require a latex install because it is pure mpl, and uses
nicer fonts .

Well, if I turn off usetex, then the LaTeX symbols don't get rendered correctly.  It's obviously trying to do something other than just write out the plain text, but it's not doing the right thing.  I quit out of matplotlib, and re-purged all the cached stuff from my .matplotlib directory, and it's still failing.  From the docs, it sounds like mathtext is just the default way for Text objects to get rendered.  It fails the same way irrespective of whether I use a raw string, or a double-quoted string:

fit_ax.set_ylabel(r'$\delta_{rms}$ [degrees]')
fit_ax.set_ylabel("$\delta_{rms}$ [degrees]")

both give a capital 'C' with a subscript 'rms'

$\bar{D}$ results in a capital D with a little circle over it.

$20^\circ$ yields 20 raised to the little tiny 'e' power.

Even if I wipe my site-packages/matplotlib* directory and egg-info, make clean, and recompile and install matplotlib from the SVN source, I still get the same problem.  I don't know if it means anything, but I note that the mpl-data/fonts directory in SVN has 282 sub-entries, and the mpl-data/fonts directory that's getting installed in my site-packages only has 99 sub-entries.  But maybe they aren't supposed to be the same?  Dunno.

So for now I can only get my math symbols to render with text.usetext turned on.

I'll read up on the text formatters.  Thanks for all your help!

Zane

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Zane Selvans
Amateur Earthling
303/815-6866
PGP Key: 55E0815F