Does https://matplotlib.org/stable/gallery/text_labels_and_annotations/font_family_rc_sgskip.html help?

This SO post is also quite good: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45877746/changing-fonts-in-matplotlib

Google doesn't turn up more complete docs on our side, which seems a shame. Are there more @aitikgupta ?

@jklymak Thanks for the reply!

Does matplotlib.org/stable/gallery/text_labels_and_annotations/font_family_rc_sgskip.html help?

I set font.family to Hack Nerd Font, and this was the output:

from matplotlib import rcParams
rcParams['font.family'] = 'Hack Nerd Font'
rcParams['font.sans-serif'] = ['Hack Nerd Font']
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
fig, ax = plt.subplots()
ax.plot([1, 2, 3], label='test')

ax.legend()
ax.set_xlabel('测试')
plt.show()

MPL didn't complain about missing glyphs, but the characters are not rendered correctly.

This SO post is also quite good: stackoverflow.com/questions/45877746/changing-fonts-in-matplotlib

I was able to get a list of fonts files (font_list) installed on my machine, but the last line of the code

font_names = [fm.FontProperties(fname=fname).get_name() for fname in font_list]

RuntimeError: In FT2Font: Could not set the fontsize (error code 0x17)

didn't work.

MPL didn't complain about missing glyphs, but the characters are not rendered correctly.

If there are missing glyphs (text not rendering correctly) - Matplotlib is supposed to emit out the warnings, you might want to try it again?

Are you certain that the font you're using (Hack Nerd Font) contains these glyphs - 测试? I tried reproducing with https://github.com/ryanoasis/nerd-fonts/tree/master/patched-fonts/Hack, it did warn me about the missing glyphs from this font too.

You can follow this blog to use custom fonts with Pandas, another SO discussion you might want to take a look at.

Basically there's 2 ways:

1. import matplotlib, set custom font as global font.
2. import matplotlib, define an ax with custom font, and pass that to pandas.

Google doesn't turn up more complete docs on our side

Unfortunately, we don't have a solid entry point which talks in-depth about using custom fonts - we might be tracking this here: #5941

I'd vote for closing this issue in favour of other similar issues (eg, #17498, #18883) that basically track the proposed solutions mentioned by @tddschn:

• Dynamically determine the default font family by choosing from a list of available fonts that supports unicode characters.
• Only fallback to font families with poor or no unicode support when no such fonts are available on users' system.
• Allow people to work with matplotlib with minimal friction when it comes to unicode text or data.

Sure let's continue discussion at those issues. Thanks!

@aitikgupta

Unfortunately, we don't have a solid entry point which talks in-depth about using custom fonts

I wonder if there is a MPL predefined font (i.e. non-custom font) that has good unicode support?

Nerd Fonts simply adds a bunch of fancy symbols, so we can ignore that part of it. Going to the Hack fonts (https://sourcefoundry.org/hack/) details, they state:

Over 1500 glyphs that include lovingly tuned extended Latin, modern Greek, and Cyrillic character sets.

That is nowhere near enough glyphs to cover CJK, and if you check it in e.g., fontforge, you will find no CJK glyphs. Your terminal supports glyph fallback and is picking a different font, as is discussed in the other issues.

@QuLogic You're right.

I found a working solution but it's ugly (PingFang is a system font that supports CJK chars shipped with macOS):

@aitikgupta

Basically there's 2 ways:
import matplotlib, set custom font as global font.
import matplotlib, define an ax with custom font, and pass that to pandas.

Those are great ideas!
I tried to set the font family for the ax but with no success.
Can you show me how to do both? Thanks!

Also see: https://matplotlib.org/stable/tutorials/text/text_props.html#text-with-non-latin-glyphs

Oh good find. I knew we had something like that, but it's not easy to find.

Any progress here? I'm having the same issue, my fonts display properly in my Pandas DataFrame, but if I set the font family, only my non-standard characters display (and the Latin characters do not!).

matplotlib.rcParams['font.family'] = ['Noto Sans Tibetan', 'sans-serif']

@thedirk Yes, see https://matplotlib.org/stable/users/prev_whats_new/whats_new_3.6.0.html#font-fallback that lets you set up multiple fonts and we will fallback through them until we find the glyph requested.