Make font fallback work better

[mwaskom]

Closes #171 (cf #55)

I think this is a robust solution to the font issues. @westurner do you want to take a look?

[mwaskom]

Welp, that didn't work. I really don't understand how matplotlib handles fonts.

[mwaskom]

Relevant SO question here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/23273349/how-to-set-multiple-possible-default-matplotlib-fonts

[westurner]

This may be a good question to ask of the https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib devs.

(Possibly as a DOC issue/bug)

• https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/blob/master/lib/matplotlib/style/core.py
• https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/blob/master/lib/matplotlib/rcsetup.py
• http://matplotlib.org/contents.html (ctrl-f "style")

[mwaskom]

Based on matplotlib/matplotlib#3010 it looks like this is a problem in matplotlib itself...

[westurner]

Looks like matplotlib/matplotlib#2771 was just merged; but that pull likely won't make it into a release for quite some time.

What was the issue with prepending to font['sans-serif']? Manual visual testing indicated success. [1]

[1] westurner@617f705

[mwaskom]

The problem was that it doesn't actually work, hence the SO question/matplotlib issue...

[westurner]

The linked commit works with Ubuntu 12.04 and conda packages (out of the box w/ Arial as the default font).

[mwaskom]

I don't know what to tell you; look at the Travis logs. It clearly does not work.

[mwaskom]

Sounds like this is going to stay broken until Matplotlib 1.4 comes out ("soon" according to @mdboom), at which point I'll merge this in and make a note that fonts may not behave as expected if using matplotlib 1.3.

[westurner]

Thanks!

Wes Turner
On May 13, 2014 11:04 AM, "Michael Waskom" notifications@github.com wrote:

Sounds like this is going to stay broken until Matplotlib 1.4 comes out
("soon" according to @mdboom https://github.com/mdboom), at which point
I'll merge this in and make a note that fonts may not behave as expected if
using matplotlib 1.3.

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Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com//pull/176#issuecomment-42975416
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[westurner]

Thanks again!