\text does not work in a matplotlib label

Question

I am using matplotlib together with latex labels for the axis, title and colorbar labels

While it works really great most of the time, it has some issues when you have a formula using \text.

One really simple example.

from matplotlib import pyplot as plt plt.plot([1,2,3]) plt.title(r"$f_{\text{cor, r}}$")  plt.show() 

This will result in an error message like:

IPython/core/formatters.py:239: FormatterWarning: Exception in image/png formatter:  f_{\text{1cor, r}}    ^ Unknown symbol: \text (at char 3), (line:1, col:4)   FormatterWarning, 

Is there an easy way to use \text in there?

Answer 1

\text won't work because it requires the amsmath package (not included in mathtext - the math rendering engine of matplotlib). So you basically have two options:

• use latex based font rendering

from matplotlib import pyplot as plt import matplotlib as mpl mpl.rcParams['text.usetex'] = True mpl.rcParams['text.latex.preamble'] = [r'\usepackage{amsmath}'] #for \text command plt.plot([1,2,3]) plt.title(r"$f_{\text{cor, r}}$") plt.show() 

2. use mathtext but use \mathrm instead of \text

from matplotlib import pyplot as plt import matplotlib as mpl mpl.rcParams['text.usetex'] = False  # not really needed plt.plot([1,2,3]) plt.title(r"$f_{\mathrm{cor, r}}$") plt.show() 

The latter approach creates a figure like
Be aware that unlike with the \text command, spaces inside the \mathrm environment are not respected. If you want more space between the variables you have to use latex style commands (\<space>, \;, ...).