unicode encoding support

Jean-Michel> Hi, Does anyone know why Agg backend does not support
    Jean-Michel> non-ASCII chars? I think many non-English speaking
    Jean-Michel> users would really appreciate to be able to use their
    Jean-Michel> full alphabet in graphics :wink: while taking advantage
    Jean-Michel> of the great Agg technique.

We are in favor of unicode support in agg, we just haven't had the
time, knowledge or man-power to do it. fonts are hard, as you
probably know, and we have to figure out the right handling in
freetype and the ft2font wrapper, in the pycxx extension generating
code, and in the font manager. All manageable, but tough.

Have you seen the accented character demo?

  http://matplotlib.sf.net/examples/accented_text.py

Hopefully, someone (maybe you <wink>) will find the time to tackle
unicode support for ft2font, font_manager, and backend_agg in the
not-too-distant-future.

JDH