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

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

The STIX fonts are included with matplotlib, as the licensing permits 
this.  We actually ship TTF versions of the fonts, converted from the 
original OTF files, since the built-in font rendering (i.e. when not 
using XeTeX etc.) does not support OTF.  See MEP14 for a discussion of 
some of the gory details, if you're interested.

On 07/21/2013 04:08 AM, David P. Sanders wrote:
>
>
>
> On Sat, Jul 20, 2013 at 2:03 PM, Benjamin Root <ben...@ou... 
> <mailto: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.)

So it appears the fuzziness is specific to the IPython notebook.  I 
think at the Scipy sprints we determined that using the MacOSX backend 
directly that there were no issues with the retina display. Let's maybe 
file an issue with the IPython folks about this.  Since there is already 
a retina display plugin in IPython, perhaps a dicussion should be 
started about autodetecting the retina case and switching it on in that 
case.  (I have no idea if that's technically feasible -- I don't know 
how Safari etc. implement the retina support).

BTW: This is IPython's PR where this was added: 
https://github.com/ipython/ipython/pull/3381

>
> 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.

STIX is designed to blend seamlessly with Times (New Roman), so you can 
set the default family to that.  It might be worth discussing whether 
setting `math.fontset` to `stix` should do that by default. (It's tricky 
because it creates a dependency between different rcParams), but in the 
meantime, that is the best workaround.

>
> 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?

The default font is Bitstream Vera Sans.  At the time it was chosen, it 
was the only really obvious option for an open source font. There are 
better options now -- it would need to be something not only freely 
redistibutable, but also open source (to meet Debian and RedHat 
requirements).  I don't know if we need to change the default, so much 
as make it easier to change (a la Tony's PR #2236).  If there is a way 
to distribute fonts along with styles, that would be killer.  I also 
hope to support WebFonts (which would be "installation free") as part of 
my ongoing work on MEP14, so that will get better, too.

Mike

>
> David.
>
>
>
>
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