Mapping fonts properly

Daniel_Hyams1 · August 23, 2010, 2:00am

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.

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.

Thanks,

···

–
Daniel Hyams
dhyams@…287…

Michael_Droettboom1 · August 23, 2010, 2:12pm

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](http://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

Daniel_Hyams1 · August 23, 2010, 3:08pm

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 <mdroe@…86…> 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](http://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.

-- Michael Droettboom
Science Software Branch
Space Telescope Science Institute
Baltimore, Maryland, USA
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

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–
Daniel Hyams
dhyams@…287…

Michael_Droettboom1 · August 23, 2010, 4:05pm

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?

The cache exists because it can take a long time to read through all of
the font files on the system each time matplotlib is imported. It
might be fast enough to simply stat the dates on all the files in the
font directories (without reading their contents)… I don’t know if
experiments were done on this when the cache was originally added (that
pre-dates me).

Mike

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-- Michael Droettboom
Science Software Branch
Space Telescope Science Institute
Baltimore, Maryland, USA