[Matplotlib-users] Type 1 fonts with log graphs

[Brandon H. <bra...@st...>]

Hi,

I'm trying to use Matplotlib graphs as part of a camera-ready
submission, and the publishing house requires the use of Type 1 fonts
only.

I'm finding that the PDF backend happily outputs Type-1 fonts for
simple graphs with linear Y axes, but outputs Type-3 fonts for
logarithmic Y axes.

Using a logarithmic yscale incurs the use of mathtext, which seems to
use Type 3 fonts, presumably because of the default use of exponential
notation.  I can use an ugly hack to get around this - using
pyplot.yticks() to force the axis ticks to not use exponents - but
this would require moving the plot region to accommodate large labels
(like 10 ^ 6) or writing the axes as 10, 100, 1K, etc. so they fit.

There's a minimum working example below, which I've tested with the
matplotlib master branch as of today, as well as 1.1.1, which produces
the same behavior, so I don't know that this is a bug, probably just
unexpected behavior.


#!/usr/bin/env python
# Simple program to test for type 1 fonts.
# Generate a line graph w/linear and log Y axes.

from matplotlib import rc, rcParams

#rc('font',**{'family':'sans-serif','sans-serif':['Helvetica']})

# These lines are needed to get type-1 results:
# http://nerdjusttyped.blogspot.com/2010/07/type-1-fonts-and-matplotlib-figures.html
rcParams['ps.useafm'] = True
rcParams['pdf.use14corefonts'] = True
rcParams['text.usetex'] = False

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

YSCALES = ['linear', 'log']

def plot(filename, yscale):
    plt.figure(1)
    xvals = range(1, 2)
    yvals = xvals
    plt.plot(xvals, yvals)
    plt.yscale(yscale)
    #YTICKS = [1, 10]
    #plt.yticks(YTICKS, YTICKS)  # locs, labels
    ax = plt.gca()
    #print ax.get_xticklabels()[0].get_text()
    print ",".join([a.get_label() for a in ax.get_yticklabels()])
    plt.savefig(filename + '.pdf')


if __name__ == '__main__':
    for yscale in YSCALES:
        plot('linegraph-' + yscale, yscale)



Does anyone know a clean way to get Type 1 fonts with log axes?

Thanks,
Brandon