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.

Answer 1

Prefix the strings with u to tell Python that they are Unicode strings:

ax.set_yticklabels([u'é', u'ã', u'â'])