Accented characters in Matplotlib

Question

Is there a way to get Matplotlib to render accented chars (é,ã,â,etc)?

For instance, I'm trying to use accented characters on set_yticklabels() and Matplotlib renders squares instead, and when I use unicode() it renders the wrong characters.

Is there a way to make this work?

It turns out you can use u"éã", but first you have to set the file encoding:

# Using the magic encoding
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

After that Matplotlib correctly renders

u"é"

I also learned that you can use

import matplotlib.font_manager as fm
fp1=fm.FontProperties(fname="/path/to/somefont.ttf")
ax.title("é",fontproperties=fp1)

in case you need to render a characters that Matplotlib does not have.

Good question. Unicode has a rich repertoire of mathematical symbols, and I would hope that Unicode would work when used. — Craig McQueen
– Craig McQueen, Commented Mar 9, 2010 at 8:09
Is there a way to mimic this behaviour using the interactive mode? (For example, I'm using IPython.) The trick with using font manager didn't work for me. — lubomir.brindza
– lubomir.brindza, Commented Mar 21, 2011 at 20:30

ptomato · Accepted Answer · 2010-03-09 12:13:12Z

16

Prefix the strings with u to tell Python that they are Unicode strings:

ax.set_yticklabels([u'é', u'ã', u'â'])

answered Mar 9, 2010 at 12:13

ptomato

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4 Comments

OldJim Over a year ago

Thanks for your input ptomato but it renders the wrong characters when i use u"é" or unicode('é','latin-1'), do these work for you?

ptomato Over a year ago

Yes, those work for me. As you say in your update, it was your file encoding that was causing the problem.

ptomato Over a year ago

What happens with those certain characters? I am guessing you did not include coding: utf8 in a comment at the top of the file.

abukaj Over a year ago

@DrunkenMaster see the answer for stackoverflow.com/questions/10960463/…

Steve Tjoa · Accepted Answer · 2010-03-09 04:56:45Z

8

Sure. You can use TeX:

from matplotlib import rcParams
rcParams['text.usetex'] = True
ax = ... # Axes object
ax.set_yticklabels(['$\'{e}$', '$\tilde{a}$', '$\hat{a}$'])

answered Mar 9, 2010 at 4:56

Steve Tjoa

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2 Comments

OldJim Over a year ago

Using tex works, but since the text to be rendered is in a database (unicode) i will have to "convert" it every time, or there is a easier solution here?

Steve Tjoa Over a year ago

Oh, okay. Yeah, then this solution might be annoying. Use the other solution.

simoes · Accepted Answer · 2013-01-18 00:00:15Z

5

I also had this problem specifically when I was trying to use the annotate function. Here was my error message:

ValueError: matplotlib display text must have all code points < 128 or use Unicode strings

And here's what I used to resolve this:

"accented string i.e. sāo paulo".decode('utf-8')

answered Jan 18, 2013 at 0:00

simoes

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Comments

dk_sasaki · Accepted Answer · 2013-04-12 15:24:31Z

1

from matplotlib import rc

rcParams['text.latex.unicode']=True

edited Apr 12, 2013 at 15:24

user907729

answered Apr 12, 2013 at 15:02

dk_sasaki

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