Plots.jl: Changing axis scale overwrites `guidefont` parameters

[lissonc]

The following code reproduces the issue on v.0.5.1.:

using Plots

pyplot(tickfont = font(12, "Times New Roman"))

x = randn(1000) + 5;

# Appears correctly with Times New Roman as the font for y-ticks
plot(x)

# Appears incorrectly with the y-tick font reset to default
plot(x, yscale = :log10) 

Is this behaviour desired? Is there a workaround for this?

[mkborregaard]

sounds like a bug

[lissonc]

I thought so. But is there perhaps a temporary workaround?

[mkborregaard]

No I don't think so. I mean you can always open the code and try to edit it yourself, if you feel adventureous. We'll try to fix it - there also appears to be some font issues with the other backends (e.g. GR doesn't show the fonts correctly).

[apalugniok]

I've found that the LaTeX strings which are used for the log axis labels always ignore the given font.

[mkborregaard]

Aha!

[swt30]

This seems to be a problem with matplotlib 2.0 (see https://github.com/JuliaPy/PyPlot.jl/issues/309)

In the meantime, here's a partial solution for Plots: in the definition of labelfunc(scale::Symbol, backend::PyPlotBackend), you can put escaped dollar signs around the exponent:

x -> latexstring("10\$^{$x}\$")

which stops mathtext being used for everything except the exponent itself and therefore shows the base in the correct font.

[swt30]

... and you can fix the mathtext too by meddling with the matplotlibrc. For example, to set the mathtext font to Helvetica, you can do:

import PyPlot
PyPlot.rc("mathtext", fontset = "custom", rm = "Helvetica", 
          it = "Helvetica:italic", bf = "Helvetica:bold", sf = "Helvetica")

as seen here.

I imagine Plots can wrap calls to PyPlot with something that will pass this information through. But I don't think you can set the appearance of mathtext differently for titles, annotations, guides or labels - so it's not as easy as just passing on the font setting from guidefont. For example, if you choose a different font for the title and then use mathtext in it, the mathtext will look out of place in the title.