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I'm trying to add some text to my plot which is RTL (in this case, Hebrew). After some work managed to get it to display the text, but it's displayed LTR (meaning, in the reverese order). I've dug into the reference and did extensive search online and nothing came up.

An example for what I'm using:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
plt.text(0.5, 0.5, u'שלום כיתה א', name = 'Arial')
plt.show()

and it displays 'א התיכ םלוש'. In case you can't see the Hebrew, it's as if i'd input 'Hello', and the output would be 'olleH'.

I can't simply reverse the input since it's mixed LTR and RTL.

Every help would be appreciated.

Korem
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  • can you have RTL and LTR 'words' separately? Then you could've reversed the RTL ones just before `join`ing them all together – ev-br Mar 14 '13 at 23:24
  • do you have the explicit unicode direction characters in the string? – tacaswell Mar 15 '13 at 03:06
  • @Zhenya - no, I can't. They are supplied to my code and not assembled by it. – Korem Mar 16 '13 at 12:10
  • @tcaswell - I don't know how to check. But if I use python's print the string is displayed correctly, so I guess they are there. – Korem Mar 16 '13 at 12:11
  • Can you explain, how did you managed to write hebrew in the graph in the first place? – Dror Hilman May 30 '16 at 06:59

6 Answers6

60

For Arabic you need both bidi.algorithm.get_display and arabic_reshaper modules:

from bidi.algorithm import get_display
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import arabic_reshaper

reshaped_text = arabic_reshaper.reshape(u'لغةٌ عربيّة')
artext = get_display(reshaped_text)

plt.text(0.25, 0.45, artext , name = 'Times New Roman',fontsize=50)
plt.show()

python matplotlib arabic text

Nasser Al-Wohaibi
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33

For whoever encounters the same problem, I found a partial solution.

The bidi package provides this functionality, so using:

from bidi import algorithm as bidialg
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
text = bidialg.get_display(u'שלום כיתה א')
plt.text(0.5, 0.5, text , name = 'Arial')
plt.show()

displays it correctly.

So why is it partial? Because I found out that the bidi package sometimes messes up latex expression which I use with matplotlib. So use it carefully.

Korem
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    hi, when I try this all non-English letters get displayed as blank squares and the following error message gets generated: ```/usr/local/anaconda3/lib/python3.5/site-packages/matplotlib/font_manager.py:1288: UserWarning: findfont: Font family ['Arial'] not found. Falling back to Bitstream Vera Sans (prop.get_family(), self.defaultFamily[fontext]))``` It seems I need to install new fonts but all of my tries have been failed to do so. Do you have any suggestion? – Rotail Mar 29 '18 at 18:48
5

You can try to flip the text by :

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
plt.text(0.5, 0.5, (u'שלום כיתה א')[::-1], name = 'Arial')
plt.show()

dev.doc
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Leonid Nikolaev
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    I used your solution, and it worked for me! I just added a check to see if these are non-Latin letters: from string import printable if bool(set(text) - set(printable)): text = text[::-1] – Dot Plot Apr 04 '22 at 10:26
3

I had the same issue and i think that using both answers of @Korem and @Nasser Al-Wohaibi like:

import arabic_reshaper
from bidi.algorithm import get_display

new_text=get_display(arabic_reshaper.reshape(old_text))

because only the arabic_reshaper didnt rearrange the letters and the bidi only didn't combine them

^_^

mohaa8844
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0

I know my answer is not the solution for this problem but using Plotly instead of matplotlib solved my problem. It shows Persian language words correctly.

Mehrdad Salimi
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-3

Use altair instead. It is compatible with Arabic/Persian text right off the bat. No need to change anything! https://altair-viz.github.io/index.html

Rotail
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