Re: [matplotlib-devel] How to use STIX fonts in matplotlib plots?

[David P. S. <dps...@ci...>]

On Sat, Jul 20, 2013 at 2:03 PM, Benjamin Root <ben...@ou...> wrote:

> David,
>
> IIRC, we were just starting to investigate how to produce retina graphics.
> Perhaps you might be able to help Mike D and Michael de Hoon with there
> efforts because very few of us have retina displays.
>

Sure, I'm very happy to help.

First let me return to the fonts issue.
I had been misunderstanding the rcParams (this seems to be a recurring
problem at the moment ;) - some new documentation is definitely required; I
will try to get round to add it to my matplotlib.settings notebook).

The fuzziness I referred to was indeed a retina issue, stemming from the
fact *that the default output format is still PNG*. It seems to me that
these days the default output should be SVG, which immediately resolves all
retina issues!! (And a lot of other issues, it seems to me.)

The current status of retina support is actually reasonable. There are two
options:

%load_ext retina
%config InlineBackend.figure_format = 'retina'

In the absence of tab completion for %load_ext and %config, and not
understanding the code, I am not sure if these are synonyms or not. But the
effect is to have PNGs produced with twice the vertical and horizontal
resolution. (The problem comes if, for example, these are included in
output sent to nbviewer, in which case they appear twice as large.)

One STIX font question remains: How can I get the text of the tick labels
and other things to also be in STIX?
settings['font.family'] = 'stix'
does not work, apparently.

And could the default font finally be changed to something else? What are
the licensing requirements for the font? Is it distributed with matplotlib,
or how does it work?

David.