[matplotlib-devel] Produce text runs in the postscript backend

[Eric M. <ew...@re...>]

Hi,

I posted on the user list a while back about saving editable text using the
postscript backend [1].  There I was informed that this was changed a few
years ago to individually place glyphs.  It looks to me, that this change
was about correctly supporting unicode in this backend [2].

Would the project be open to changing this to produce text runs when all of
the characters are ascii? This way, the general unicode case should still
work but runs of text where the special handling is not necessary should
result in editable text.  I'm happy to work up a patch, but I don't want to
spend the time if there is no hope of it being merged.

My use case is to be able to make some tweaks to figures post mpl.  In my
case this tends to be to either combine figures from several sources into a
single coherent figure or to adjust the figure size or spacing slightly so
the final figure fits into the space available.  All of this can be done in
mpl directly, but in terms of effective use of my time, opening the figure
in Corel Draw, Inkscape or Illustrator is much faster since I can get the
figure 90% of the way there quickly and easily using mpl.

Eric

1. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.python.matplotlib.general/34816
2.
https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/commit/80321a3b489994748b79e41bc34a65f836a9a03f