Matplotlib cannot find some Chinese fonts on my computer

Community
1

Hi. I am trying to draw a plot using matplotlib.

I set fontfamily in textprops to display Chinese characters. I tried 等距更纱黑体 SC (which is already installed on my computer), but errors occur:

findfont: Font family '等距更纱黑体 SC' not found.

Then I tried Source Han Sans. It can be found, but the weight is extra light and the style is Japanese style, and I can’t configure them. However, others fonts I installed like Fira Code can work properly.

So why is this happening, and how to fix this? I suspect that it may be because 等距更纱黑体 SC and Source Han Sans are both SuperOTC files, while Fira Code is just TTF.

2

Try code as below

cn_font = fm.FontProperties(fname=font_path)
mpl.rcParams['font.family'] = cn_font.get_name()
...
ax.text(fontproperties=cn_font...
3

Thank you and sorry for the late reply.

Here is my code:

import matplotlib as mpl
import matplotlib.font_manager as fm
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

cn_font = fm.FontProperties(fname=r'C:\Users\EricQiu\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Fonts\Sarasa-SuperTTC.ttc')
print(cn_font.get_name())
mpl.rcParams['font.family'] = cn_font.get_name()
plt.title('123ABC关复门')
plt.plot([3, 2, 4, 1])
plt.show()

Here is the plot:

Plot
Plot1606×1351 93.9 KB

Surprisingly, the output is Sarasa Gothic CL. I also searched on the web and found that matplotlib.font_manager.fontManager.ttflist stores a list of all avaliable fonts. Sarasa is in that list, however, its name is also Sarasa Gothic CL.

Sarasa-SuperTTC.ttc is a collection file of 48 fonts, however, only the first one is detected. Do you know how to make font manager use the rest of the fonts?

4

Unfortunately, we don’t fully support .ttc files; only the first font in the collection is used.

If you are able to use mplcairo as a backend instead, it does support selecting specific fonts from a collection:

5

Thank you! I will use TTF instead.