Thanks for your response Michael!
Deleting the fontList.cache indeed solved the problem. The first sample
that I gave below now works fine under both Windows and Linux; whew...I
would have never known about that cache file without your help.
So, should the fontList.cache file be deleted each time my app runs, in case
new fonts have been installed since the last invocation? How do we keep
that cache up to date?
On Mon, Aug 23, 2010 at 10:12 AM, Michael Droettboom <md...@stsci.edu>wrote:
> On 08/22/2010 10:00 PM, Daniel Hyams wrote:
>
> I am searching for advice on how to handle selecting a specific font, and
> using that in a matplotlib figure. As a background, the font will be picked
> through the wx.FontDialog (common font dialog) provided by wxPython. So,
> what I will have is the font face (Arial, Times New Roman, Algerian, etc.
> etc.), the weight, the style (italic, normal) and the point size. All I
> want to do is create a matplotlib font that matches this, and use it in the
> plot. My first try was this:
>
> import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
> import matplotlib.font_manager as fm
>
> # this does not work. The title font is wrong.
> the_font = 'Century Schoolbook'
> fp = fm.FontProperties()
> fp.set_name(the_font)
> fp.set_size(24)
> plt.title('The Title that should be in Century
> Schoolbook',fontproperties=fp)
> print fp
> plt.show()
>
> But that didn't work. I know that "Century Schoolbook" is not really a
> font family, but in the docs it says that you can list a font there.
>
> On my RHEL5 system (at least), the full name of that font is "Century
> Schoolbook L". You do, of course, have to match the font name exactly.
>
> You may want to experiment with using wx.Font.GetFaceName vs.
> wx.Font.GetFamilyString from the font chooser dialog and see if either
> returns the correct result.
>
> You can see the list of fonts that matplotlib found on your system by
> doing:
>
> from matplotlib import font_manager
> font_manager.fontManager.ttflist
>
> (This is not a public API -- but may help with debugging the issue here).
>
> Is the font you are hoping to match with in that list?
>
> Another thing you may want to try is deleting matplotlib's font cache, in
> case this font was installed after matplotlib was first run on your system.
> It is is in a file "fontList.cache" and lives in the user data area (can't
> remember the exact location of this on Windows off hand).
>
>
> The following does work, if I manually set the TrueType file explicitly:
>
> fp = fm.FontProperties()
> fp.set_file('c:\\Windows\Fonts\CENSCBK.TTF')
> fp.set_size(24)
> print fp
> plt.title('The Title that is in Century Schoolbook',fontproperties=fp)
> plt.show()
>
> So I guess the question is....how does one accomplish this, portably? I
> don't quite understand the ins and outs of fonts.....
>
>
> p.s.
> I did take a stab at creating a mapping between the font names / weights /
> styles like this:
>
> all_fontfiles = fm.win32InstalledFonts()
> allfonts = fm.createFontList(all_fontfiles)
> fontdict = {}
> for f in allfonts:
> fontdict[(f.name,f.style,f.weight)] = f.fname
>
> And I think I can get this to work, because this maps me to a TTF file for
> any name, style, and weight combination. But this seemed awfully hacky, and
> I don't know what problems I'll run into on other platforms (obviously, I
> would have get all_fontfiles above differently on each platform). If this
> is the only way to do it, I guess that's OK, but I thought that surely there
> was a better way.
>
> That's basically a stricter way of doing what the matplotlib code already
> does. The matplotlib lookup is actually smarter because it handles
> approximate "nearest neighbor" matches. I think the problem is more likely
> one of the above (an inexact name match or an out-of-date font cache).
>
> Mike
>
> --
> Michael Droettboom
> Science Software Branch
> Space Telescope Science Institute
> Baltimore, Maryland, USA
>
>
>
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--
Daniel Hyams
dhy...@gmail.com
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