Re: [Matplotlib-users] 0.99.1.2: error in afm.py

[Paul I. <piv...@gm...>]

On Sat, Oct 22, 2011 at 7:54 AM, Rich Shepard <rsh...@ap...> wrote:
> On Fri, 21 Oct 2011, Paul Ivanov wrote:
>   I will certainly add diagnostic code requested by you, Ben, and anyone
> else and report the results when trying to run the model. I do need to fix
> this and have no idea what's behind the problem.

The traceback is due to a nonprinting character being included in one
of the fonts on your system - we just need to figure out which one.
Change my request to add 'sys.stderr.write(fh.name)' before the 'while
1:' in
_parse_char_metrics  - just so we don't have any buffering issues. The
last file you see printed there will be the one that's causing the
issue. You can then try removing it, or sending it back to the list
(or both) so we can see what happened.

The other issue you're seeing ("unknown keyword in AFM header") is
also likely caused by bad font files.
>From your error log that Ben forwarded to the list - I'm a bit
suspicious that two of the errors came from an afm file that ships
with matplotlib, in particular matplotlib-error-trace.txt starts off
with:

  FILENAME:
  /usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/matplotlib/mpl-data/fonts/afm/pagko8a.afm
  Found an unknown keyword in AFM header (was Underline)
  Found an unknown keyword in AFM header (was Underline)

This shouldn't be the case, as I can verify that the keywords aren't
just Underline - they are as follows:

  $ grep Under matplotlib/mpl-data/fonts/afm/pagko8a.afm
  UnderlinePosition -100
  UnderlineThickness 50

and that particular file has not been change in matplotlib since
February of 2007

So my wild guess is that something changed your afm files. Can you
check that your pagko8a.afm matches the one in
https://raw.github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/master/lib/matplotlib/mpl-data/fonts/afm/pagko8a.afm
- and if they don't match, check that using the original pagko8a.afm
makes at least that error go away?

As another possible solution (maybe this is already done, but worth a
potshot), you could try switching USE_FONTCONFIG to True in
font_manager.py as per the docstring there:

Experimental support is included for using `fontconfig` on Unix
variant platforms (Linux, OS X, Solaris).  To enable it, set the
constant ``USE_FONTCONFIG`` in this file to ``True``.  Fontconfig has
the advantage that it is the standard way to look up fonts on X11
platforms, so if a font is installed, it is much more likely to be
found.)

best,
-- 
Paul Ivanov
314 address only used for lists,  off-list direct email at:
http://pirsquared.org | GPG/PGP key id: 0x0F3E28F7