[Matplotlib-users] Old-style/text figures

[Andy B. <an...@in...>]

Hi,

I'm using MPL to implement a new plotter for a project has so far been
using a custom-written LaTeX+pstricks script. Despite being slow and a
bit hacky, the output is really quite nice and I want to try and emulate
it as closely as possible via MPL; for example:

https://users.hepforge.org/~buckley/atlas-py8-shower-e/ATLAS_2012_I1094568/d03-x02-y01.pdf

I more or less have this working, but would really like to be able to
use the "old-style figures" (OSF) numerals with variable baseline (aka
lower-case or text figures cf.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_figures), which give those plots quite
a bit of their character.

Probably this will anyway be possible only with the TeX or PGF backend
to MPL, but what would be the best way to enable OSF figures from MPL?
If I correctly understand the backend, the rc params font.family & e.g.
font.serif are passed to the LaTeX fontspec package -- and in the
fontspec documentation
http://mirror.utexas.edu/ctan/macros/latex/contrib/fontspec/fontspec.pdf
it seems that passing the Numbers=(OldStyle) option to the \fontspec
command (or as the arg to \addfontfeature) would be the fontspec version
of, for example, \usepackage[osf]{mathpazo}. Is there a way to pass
options like this to fontspec? In general this would seem a useful thing
to be able to do, since fontspec controls far more than OSFs, but I
couldn't find a discussion of it in the docs.

Hope you can help; thanks!
Andy

-- 
Dr Andy Buckley, Royal Society University Research Fellow
Particle Physics Expt Group, University of Glasgow / PH Dept, CERN