Re: [Matplotlib-users] Mapping fonts properly

[Michael D. <md...@st...>]

On 08/23/2010 11:08 AM, Daniel Hyams wrote:
> Thanks for your response Michael!
>
> Deleting the fontList.cache indeed solved the problem.  The first 
> sample that I gave below now works fine under both Windows and Linux; 
> whew...I would have never known about that cache file without your help.
>
> So, should the fontList.cache file be deleted each time my app runs, 
> in case new fonts have been installed since the last invocation?  How 
> do we keep that cache up to date?
The cache exists because it can take a long time to read through all of 
the font files on the system each time matplotlib is imported.  It might 
be fast enough to simply stat the dates on all the files in the font 
directories (without reading their contents)... I don't know if 
experiments were done on this when the cache was originally added (that 
pre-dates me).

Mike
>>
>>
> On Mon, Aug 23, 2010 at 10:12 AM, Michael Droettboom <md...@st... 
> <mailto:md...@st...>> wrote:
>
>     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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> -- 
> Daniel Hyams
> dh...@gm... <mailto:dh...@gm...>
>
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-- 
Michael Droettboom
Science Software Branch
Space Telescope Science Institute
Baltimore, Maryland, USA