I am hoping to have a general discussion about font choices other
matplotlib users make when the figure will be seen by someone other
than yourself. Generally speaking, my figures go in to technical
memos, automatically generated reports, and on rare occasion a web
page.
For memos (created in your standard word processor at a 12 pt font), I
tend to use a 10 pt font on everything (tick labels, axis labels,
legend entries, etc). At work we use Myriad Pro (a sans serif font)
for all of our maps, which works well with plots since it goes well
with matplotlib's stix-sans math text option.
My automatically generated reports are always compiled using Latex
with the fourier package, which uses the utopia fonts (serif). So in
matplotlib I always set usetex to True and add the
\usepackage{fourier} command since that provides a seamless text and
math-text font with support for the upright Greek letter mu. The
upright mu is crucial for environmental data since the quantities that
I'm plotting are typically in micrograms per liter or kilogram.
For static images in webpages and presentations, I go back to my
sans-serif configuration and bump up the fonts as needed.
Also, my axes and tick label markers are 0.5 pt wide, though I'll bump
that up to 1.0 if a very large figure is needed.
Cheers,
-paul