It sounds as an easy problem but I do not find any effective solution to change the font (not the font size) in a plot made with matplotlib in python.
I found a couple of tutorials to change the default font of matplotlib by modifying some files in the folders where matplotlib stores its default font - see this blog post - but I am looking for a less radical solution since I would like to use more than one font in my plot (text, label, axis label, etc).
25 Answers
Say you want Comic Sans for the title and Helvetica for the x label.
csfont = {'fontname':'Comic Sans MS'} hfont = {'fontname':'Helvetica'} plt.title('title',**csfont) plt.xlabel('xlabel', **hfont) plt.show() You can also use rcParams to change the font family globally.
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt plt.rcParams["font.family"] = "cursive" # This will change to your computer's default cursive font The list of matplotlib's font family arguments is here.
I prefer to employ:
from matplotlib import rc #rc('font',**{'family':'sans-serif','sans-serif':['Helvetica']}) rc('font',**{'family':'serif','serif':['Times']}) rc('text', usetex=True) The last line ensures that tick labels are also in the correct font.
1import pylab as plb plb.rcParams['font.size'] = 12 or
import matplotlib.pyplot as mpl mpl.rcParams['font.size'] = 12 The Helvetica font does not come included with Windows, so to use it you must download it as a .ttf file. Then you can refer matplotlib to it like this (replace "crm10.ttf" with your file):
import os from matplotlib import font_manager as fm, rcParams import matplotlib.pyplot as plt fig, ax = plt.subplots() fpath = os.path.join(rcParams["datapath"], "fonts/ttf/cmr10.ttf") prop = fm.FontProperties(fname=fpath) fname = os.path.split(fpath)[1] ax.set_title('This is a special font: {}'.format(fname), fontproperties=prop) ax.set_xlabel('This is the default font') plt.show() print(fpath) will show you where you should put the .ttf.
