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, Mar 09 '10 at 08:09
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, Mar 21 '11 at 20:30
Nevermind, this is an issue with [IPython itself](https://github.com/ipython/ipython/issues/labels/unicode#issue/25). — lubomir.brindza, Mar 21 '11 at 21:36

score 16 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 09 '10 at 12:13

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 09 '10 at 12:13

ptomato

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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? – OldJim Mar 09 '10 at 14:47
Yes, those work for me. As you say in your update, it was your file encoding that was causing the problem. – ptomato Mar 09 '10 at 17:58
What happens with those certain characters? I am guessing you did not include `coding: utf8` in a comment at the top of the file. – ptomato Aug 23 '15 at 17:12
@DrunkenMaster see the answer for https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10960463/non-ascii-characters-in-matplotlib – abukaj Jan 13 '18 at 19:16

score 8 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 09 '10 at 04:56

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 09 '10 at 04:56

Steve Tjoa

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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? – OldJim Mar 09 '10 at 15:35
Oh, okay. Yeah, then this solution might be annoying. Use the other solution. – Steve Tjoa Mar 10 '10 at 03:02

score 5 · Answer 3 · answered Jan 18 '13 at 00:00

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')

score 1 · Answer 4 · edited Apr 12 '13 at 15:24

1

from matplotlib import rc

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

edited Apr 12 '13 at 15:24

Ankur

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answered Apr 12 '13 at 15:02

dk_sasaki

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Accented characters in Matplotlib

4 Answers4

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