Clearly, matplotlib's SVG backend doesn't seems to
> support TeX characters. Is it supposed to?
It does -- the only trick is you need to make sure your svg viewer can
see the fonts. Currently we use the bakoma cm*.ttf fonts that ship
with matplotlib, so make sure these fonts are in your svg viewer's
font path. In postscript, we embed the truetype fonts directly into
the PS file which makes for large output files but helps portability
across ps viewers. We were unable to figure out how to do this with
SVG.
> Is it possible to hope it will?
One can always hope 
JDH