small-caps doesn't seem to work

[geib7592]

I noticed that even in the demo, the small-caps feature is not working. I tried switching fonts to STIXGeneral, and setting variant='small-caps' still had no effect.

[coderforlife]

This is still true.

[jklymak]

Yes - recent version of docs: https://matplotlib.org/stable/gallery/text_labels_and_annotations/fonts_demo.html#sphx-glr-gallery-text-labels-and-annotations-fonts-demo-py

[anntzer]

This will basically not work (AFAICT) until we switch to using harfbuzz for font shaping (#14912). (Currently the way we detect small-caps fonts is just if their name is exactly (case-insensitively) either "capitals" or "small-caps", which of course fails to catch any relevant small caps font -- but it's not as if any simple regex on the font name would really be sufficient, see e.g. https://www.fontsc.com/font/tag/small-caps, https://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/list/tag/small%20caps.)

Given that it seems unlikely we'll switch to harfbuzz any time soon (well, it depends on whether someone picks up #14912), I think we should simply just document "variant: small-caps" as unsupported and emit a warning when the user requests that.

[jklymak]

It seems regenerating the images is the only hold up for harfbuzz?

[anntzer]

Actually there's a bit more, e.g. figuring out whether we need static linking (especially the situation on non-linux), fixing a version, and all that stuff...

[jklymak]

Where are we tracking g the image comparison issue? I think we should just go low tech and have two repositories and let folks who want smaller downloads just limit the depth they pull off GitHub.

[anntzer]

#16447