mpl ships with a copy of Vera (https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/tree/v1.5.3-doc/lib/matplotlib/mpl-data/fonts/ttf ) for <v2.0 and with a copy of dejavu for mpl =>2.0 which is a strict super-set of vera. If mpl has been properly installed (some of the linux packagers package the fonts separately) you should be able to count on one of those two fonts being there (and being equivalent).

Unfortunately, the changes to the text likely fall back to the version of freetype installed on the system. For the tests we pin to a specific version of freetype (https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/blob/master/setupext.py#L67 2.6.1) when building the tests. With this pinned, we get (and test) pixel identical results on mac, linux and windows (mostly).

You are looping over all of the fonts found on a your system which makes me think you have a specific font that we are parsing badly. Can you sort out exactly which font is causing trouble?

@tacaswell - Thanks for the explanation!

This is the font that throws the error when calling get_name():

>>> matplotlib.font_manager.FontProperties(fname='/Library/Fonts/NISC18030.ttf').get_name()
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/opt/local/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.5/lib/python3.5/site-packages/matplotlib/font_manager.py", line 737, in get_name
    return ft2font.FT2Font(findfont(self)).family_name
RuntimeError: In FT2Font: Could not set the fontsize

Using a copy of the font from https://github.com/justrajdeep/fonts I can reproduce this.

Surprised we do not see this more as it seems to be a stock font on mac https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201344

It looks like it is a font with a non-standard format, display from imagemagik also does not like it:

13:51 $ display ~/Downloads/NISC18030.ttf 
display: unable to read font `/home/tcaswell/Downloads/NISC18030.ttf' @ error/annotate.c/RenderFreetype/1389.
display: non-conforming drawing primitive definition `text' @ error/draw.c/DrawImage/3258.

This seems to be a long-standing issue as https://sourceforge.net/p/matplotlib/mailman/message/9332845/

Not clear to me if this file is mal-formed or we (and imagemagik and corelDraw) do not implement the full ttf spec.

@cdeil The best thing here would be for you to handle the exceptions at the application error as mpl should not snarf exceptions from mal-formed (ie we can not read them) fonts.

@tacaswell - For me, it's OK to just close this issue. Unless it's useful to keep for MPL as a reminder of the issue.

I just thought I'd report it in case it's an MPL issue, and because I had a related question (which you answered).

If you are happy going to close this issue.