We special cased numerical superscripting (10^3) to make log plots
faster and to keep the fonts consistent. But we haven't done this for
general superscripting. Note that there is a bug in the current
text.py which prevents event this from working, as Arnd Baeker noted
in a recent post. Fortunately, it is a one line fix so if you do need
this feature make the corrections suggested there. Also, you could
hack rgxsuper in text.py to match a larger class of strings, which
would give you at least superscripting w/o mathtext or TeX.
Aaah... sounds like this is not the end of the road. I'll take a look at rgxsuper then. There is no example around, is there?
May I ask, why you want to avoid mathtext? My guess is that you don't
like the fonts, and this is perfectly understandable. I would like to
rewrite mathtext to work with arbitrary fonts rather than the cm*
ones, but it is a question of time and priorities.
You are exactly right - the fonts are not to my liking. Also, I have some trouble getting TeX to work with MPL (I am developing on Win32, but deploying on a Linux box) so that I was hoping to get around it.
Thanks a lot!
Sascha