Accented characters in matplotlib

Question

Does anyone know a way to get matplotlib to render accented chars (é,ã,â,etc)?

For instance i'm trying to use accented chars on set_yticklabels() and matplot renders squares instead, and when i use unicode() it renders the wrong chars.

Is there a way to make this work?

Thanks in advance, Jim.

Update

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 char that matplotlib does not have.

Answer 1

Sure. You can use TeX:

from matplotlib import rcParams
rcParams['text.usetex'] = True
ax = ... # Axes object
ax.set_yticklabels(['$\'{e}$', '$\tilde{a}$', '$\hat{a}$'])

Answer 2

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

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