Hi again,
I didn't see any on-list answer, but got an off-list suggestion to use
an rc parameter to set a LaTeX preamble. I played around a little and
thought I should report on what I found, especially since it seems that
there is room for improvement here and I'd be interested to help.
Here are the relevant rc params that I have set:
"font.size" : 17,
"font.family" : "serif",
"font.serif" : ["TeX Gyre Pagella"],
"pgf.rcfonts" : True,
"pgf.preamble": [r"\usepackage{amsmath,amssymb}",
r"\usepackage{fontspec}", r"\defaultfontfeatures{Numbers=OldStyle}"],
A couple of points to note here:
* I'm using the PGF backend -- this ran a bit faster and produced much
smaller files than MPL rendering with TeX labels (text.usetex = True).
Also, I have data files with labels using macros like \text which MPL
MathText doesn't support, so I need to be able to include amsmath.
* I've had to set TeX Gyre Pagella rather than Palatino, since this SE
question points out that fontspec's Palatino doesn't support small-caps
and old-style
figures:xetex - Fontspec: Palatino with small caps and old-style figures - TeX - LaTeX Stack Exchange
* Although the backend uses fontspec, I have to import it explicitly in
my preamble, because the MPL import and use of fontspec happens _after_
where the pgf.preamble key is inserted. Actually, given that I found
fontspec doesn't seem to do the right thing for most math fonts, maybe I
need to ignore the rcfonts setting and do it a bit more manually if I
want full control -- pity.
If I ask this configuration to output a PDF file, though, I don't get
old-style figures as intended. So I started looking at the generated TeX
source by outputting as .pgf and wrapping in a little LaTeX file like this:
\documentclass[12pt,minimal]{standalone}
\usepackage{pgf}
\usepackage{amsmath,amssymb}
\usepackage{fontspec}
\setmainfont[Numbers=OldStyle]{TeX Gyre Pagella}
\begin{document}
\input{plot.pgf}
\end{document}
I've attached the result of this with the default MPL .pgf output as
plot-mpldefault.pdf. A couple of things are notable in that plot:
* Old-style figures are used in the legend (where math mode is not
used), but the axis tick labels are not.
* The full-size figures on the axes are very thin weight compared to
the text axis labels -- I knew something had looked a bit wrong in the
default output!
Looking in the .pgf file, the reason is clear. The axis ticks are in
display math mode, like this:
\pgftext[x=0.987638in,y=1.778400in,right,]{{\rmfamily\fontsize{17.000000}{20.400000}\selectfont
\(\displaystyle 1.05\)}}%
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
I removed the \(\displaystyle and \) from the file and then recompiled
with and without the Numbers=OldStyle spec in the wrapper, producing the
attached plot-textoldstyle.pdf and plot-textlining.pdf figures. In both
of these the weight of the tick labels is much more balanced with the
other labels than in the default; the old-style or lining figure style
is more a matter of personal preference, but I would like to have the
option.
Apologies for the long email! I'd appreciate any feedback. It seems that
there are a couple of small tweaks which would greatly improve the MPL
TeX/PGF output, although they probably have side-effects of which I'm
unaware:
* Don't put tick labels in math mode by default (i.e. unless a special
ticker is used). In our previous code, which I'm trying to reproduce in
MPL, even exponent-format tick labels were typeset as "10$^\text{exp}$"
which automatically gets the font weights and styles correct. Is the
current \(\displaystyle etc. specified by the default ticker or is it
specific to the PGF backend?
* I checked a bit, and fontspec seems a bit ropey when it comes to
changing math fonts to match the text font; I had to
\usepackage[osf]{mathpazo} before importing fontspec to get a correctly
weighted math font. mathspec is maybe worth investigation.
Thanks in advance, and thanks for tolerating this plot-cosmetics
obsessiveness 
Andy
plot-mpldefault.pdf (15.6 KB)
plot-textlining.pdf (14.9 KB)
plot-textoldstyle.pdf (14.9 KB)
···
On 27/10/14 14:35, Andy Buckley wrote:
Hi,
I'm using MPL to implement a new plotter for a project has so far been
using a custom-written LaTeX+pstricks script. Despite being slow and a
bit hacky, the output is really quite nice and I want to try and emulate
it as closely as possible via MPL; for example:
https://users.hepforge.org/~buckley/atlas-py8-shower-e/ATLAS_2012_I1094568/d03-x02-y01.pdf
I more or less have this working, but would really like to be able to
use the "old-style figures" (OSF) numerals with variable baseline (aka
lower-case or text figures cf.
Text figures - Wikipedia), which give those plots quite
a bit of their character.
Probably this will anyway be possible only with the TeX or PGF backend
to MPL, but what would be the best way to enable OSF figures from MPL?
If I correctly understand the backend, the rc params font.family & e.g.
font.serif are passed to the LaTeX fontspec package -- and in the
fontspec documentation
http://mirror.utexas.edu/ctan/macros/latex/contrib/fontspec/fontspec.pdf
it seems that passing the Numbers=(OldStyle) option to the \fontspec
command (or as the arg to \addfontfeature) would be the fontspec version
of, for example, \usepackage[osf]{mathpazo}. Is there a way to pass
options like this to fontspec? In general this would seem a useful thing
to be able to do, since fontspec controls far more than OSFs, but I
couldn't find a discussion of it in the docs.
Hope you can help; thanks!
Andy
--
Dr Andy Buckley, Royal Society University Research Fellow
Particle Physics Expt Group, University of Glasgow / PH Dept, CERN