Matplotlib currently uses the "hyphen" character instead of a "minus sign" when printing negative numbers in plots.
While these two characters are traditionally not distinguished in monospaced fonts, there is a big difference in proportional fonts. A hyphen (Unicode character 0x002d) is very short and used between words, whereas a minus sign (Unicode: 0x2212) is much longer and looks exactly like the horizontal part of a plus sign. Practically all modern fonts do contain a minus sign. In those fonts that still lack a minus sign, the (often slightly lower/thinner/longer) "en dash" is usually a much less painful substitute than the hyphen. [The PostScript standard encoding lacks a minus sign, but the PostScript symbol font has one at 0x2d, as documented in http://www.unicode.org/Public/MAPPINGS/VENDORS/ADOBE/symbol.txt ] Example: from pylab import * plot([-3, -2, -1], [1,-3,-2]) title(u"wrong: -2..+2 correct: \u22122..+2") show() Is there a way to cause matplotlib to use the correct minus-sign glyph? That would help to keep typographically very picky editors of scientific journals happy ... Markus -- Markus Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ || CB3 0FD, Great Britain ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by the 2008 JavaOne(SM) Conference Don't miss this year's exciting event. There's still time to save $100. Use priority code J8TL2D2. http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;198757673;13503038;p?http://java.sun.com/javaone _______________________________________________ Matplotlib-users mailing list Matplotlib-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/matplotlib-users
