Confirming that I see the same with the OSX backend

This could be related to #4024, see #4202 too

#4202 doesn't fix it. This looks like a different problem. Strangely, the text is very faintly visible as a slight lightening of the red. This is easier to see if you use fontsize=30. At least at the Python level, the default text color is not being overwritten by the background. I don't know what is happening inside the extension code.
attn: @mdehoon

In [16]: tt = text(1,2, 'hello', backgroundcolor='red', fontsize=30)

In [17]: tt.get_color()
'k'

I can't reproduce this bug. It's working fine for me with the MacOSX backend, matplotlib version 1.4.3.

@mbakker7 and @mdehoon which Python versions are you using? I tested with python 3. We have had several cases where the change between py2 and py3 in the order of iteration through a dictionary (such as kwargs in a function call) caused problems under py3.

@efiring Thanks! That is indeed the issue. With Python3, I am seeing this bug. Let me look into this.

See pull request #4617 for a bug fix.

Fixed by #4617

Sorry for the late reply: I have the problem with Python 2.7.9-1. Got the
bug on two separate Macs, one with mpl 1.4.3, one with mpl 1.4.0, so it has
been around for a little while.

Thanks for looking into this,

Mark

On Thu, Jul 9, 2015 at 11:24 PM, Eric Firing notifications@github.com
wrote:

@mbakker7 https://github.com/mbakker7 and @mdehoon
https://github.com/mdehoon which Python versions are you using? I
tested with python 3. We have had several cases where the change between
py2 and py3 in the order of iteration through a dictionary (such as kwargs
in a function call) caused problems under py3.

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#4609 (comment)
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@mbakker7 Thanks for the confirmation

If you have a chance please test master and report it it fixes it for you