matplotlib has excellent text support, including mathematical expressions, truetype support for raster and vector outputs, newline separated text with arbitrary rotations, and unicode support. Because we embed the fonts directly in the output documents, eg for postscript or PDF, what you see on the screen is what you get in the hardcopy. freetype2 support produces very nice, antialiased fonts, that look good even at small raster sizes. matplotlib includes its own :mod:`matplotlib.font_manager`, thanks to Paul Barrett, which implements a cross platform, W3C compliant font finding algorithm.
You have total control over every text property (font size, font weight, text location and color, etc) with sensible defaults set in the rc file. And significantly for those interested in mathematical or scientific figures, matplotlib implements a large number of TeX math symbols and commands, to support :ref:`mathematical expressions <mathtext-tutorial>` anywhere in your figure.
The following commands are used to create text in the pyplot interface
- :func:`~matplotlib.pyplot.text` - add text at an arbitrary location to the
Axes; :meth:`matplotlib.axes.Axes.text` in the API. - :func:`~matplotlib.pyplot.xlabel` - add an axis label to the x-axis; :meth:`matplotlib.axes.Axes.set_xlabel` in the API.
- :func:`~matplotlib.pyplot.ylabel` - add an axis label to the y-axis; :meth:`matplotlib.axes.Axes.set_ylabel` in the API.
- :func:`~matplotlib.pyplot.title` - add a title to the
Axes; :meth:`matplotlib.axes.Axes.set_title` in the API. - :func:`~matplotlib.pyplot.figtext` - add text at an arbitrary location to the
Figure; :meth:`matplotlib.figure.Figure.text` in the API. - :func:`~matplotlib.pyplot.suptitle` - add a title to the
Figure; :meth:`matplotlib.figure.Figure.suptitle` in the API. - :func:`~matplotlib.pyplot.annotate` - add an annotation, with
- optional arrow, to the
Axes; :meth:`matplotlib.axes.Axes.annotate` in the API.
All of these functions create and return a :func:`matplotlib.text.Text` instance, which can be configured with a variety of font and other properties. The example below shows all of these commands in action.
.. plot:: pyplots/text_commands.py :include-source: