Michael Droettboom <md...@stsci.edu> writes: > I've drafted a MEP with a plan to improve some of the text and font > handling in matplotlib. > > I'd love any and all feedback. > > https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/wiki/Mep14
I'm a bit late to the party, but here are a few thoughts: What I see as the biggest problem in the current font-selection system is its opaqueness. You can attempt to specify a style you'd like, but it's up to the backend to find the relevant font. The naive user has no way of knowing which font actually got selected, and no way of knowing how to modify the parameters to get what they want (except if they stumble upon the way to specify the full path to a font file). Each backend can override the font-selection code, so e.g. the ps backend has an option to use only "AFM fonts", meaning the core fonts built into PostScripts viewers. The subsetting system proposed in MEP14 (reading the font via FreeType, then rendering or outputting the outlines into the result) would make backends consistent with each other, as long as the same text engine is used. Then at least the OO API could have font selection as an explicit step, i.e. instead of ax.text(x, y, s, family='serif', style='oblique') you could write font = text_engine.find_font(family='serif', style='oblique') ax.text(x, y, s, font=font) and also query the `font` object for what actual font is being used. (Or would it look more like ax.text(x, y, text_engine.layout(s, font))?) If we want to continue support for backend idiosyncracies like ps.use_afm, I suppose those would need to be parameters to the text engine. ---- The approach of subsetting fonts by writing a new Type-3 font in the PostScript or PDF file would allow supporting any fonts that FreeType can read, but this would lose hinting information in TTF and Type-1 fonts. I think we should at least leave open the possibility to embed the original font (or a directly-derived subset). ---- The code that parses DVI files from TeX outputs not only glyphs but also boxes, which are black rectangles used to implement things like the underscore character and the varying-length part of the square-root sign. To support this, I guess TextSpan.get_chars should be able to return not only TextChar instances but also boxes. -- Jouni K. Seppänen http://www.iki.fi/jks ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ See everything from the browser to the database with AppDynamics Get end-to-end visibility with application monitoring from AppDynamics Isolate bottlenecks and diagnose root cause in seconds. Start your free trial of AppDynamics Pro today! http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=48808831&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ Matplotlib-devel mailing list Matplotlib-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/matplotlib-devel
