Changing figure fonts in Matlab has no effect

Question

I'm having problems with rendering Greek characters in my labels and legends, so I thought maybe switching fonts would help. Thus, I discovered an even bigger problem - Matlab doesn't seem to honor my font settings at all.

I've tried, of course,

set(gcf, 'FontName', 'Ubuntu')
set(gca, 'FontName', 'Ubuntu')

but also things like

set(findall(gca, 'type', 'text'), 'FontName', 'Ubuntu')

and

set(0,'DefaultAxesFontName', 'Ubuntu')

I also tried switching renderers, with

set(0, 'DefaultFigureRenderer', 'OpenGL') % also tried 'zbuffer' and 'painters' 

I even went into property editor on the figure, and manually changed the fonts. Regardless of what I do, the font comes out with the same, ugly monospaced font (see figure below). This picture is saved with the Save As... command in the menu bar of the figure, but e.g. print -dpng 'fonttest.png' doesn't work either.

I've double-checked both with fc-list in my terminal, and listfonts at the Matlab command prompt, that the Ubuntu font is installed and available. I'm running Matlab R2012b.

How do I set the fonts in my figures?

UPDATE:
As suggested in comments, I tried to see if this is might be an issue with Java on Ubuntu. Sure enough, switching from OpenJDK to Oracle Java helped, but not enough - I can use Helvetica and a few others, but I can't choose freely among my installed fonts. The Ubuntu font, for example, does not work. (It does, however, in the main GUI of Matlab - there I've changed the fonts to Ubuntu in menus etc, and Consolas in the editor and command window, and it renders OK.)

Whenever I choose a figure font that doesn't work, Matlab uses what's shown in the screenshot below as fallback.

The p, q and f here should really be the greek letters pi, theta and phi (they're specified with \pi etc) but I guess the font doesn't have those characters. The weird stuff in the y-label of the third plot is a Swedish ö - it shouldn't be a problem with encodings, because the file is saved as UTF-8, which is also what slCharacterEncoding returns, so I assume that's also a font issue.

Answer 1

Installing xfonts-75dpi and xfonts-100dpi did the trick for me for the default settings.

sudo apt-get install xfonts-75dpi xfonts-100dpi

and then log out and log in again.

This seems to allow both symbols (e.g. \pi) and font size (e.g. set(h, 'FontSize', 14)) changes (using the default Matlab font).

Machine setup: Ubuntu 12.04 x64 with Matlab R2012b

Answer 2

Try using the option 'Interpreter', 'LaTex' (default is 'Interpreter', 'Tex'). This may get you to a less buggy font renderer.