pyfonts 0.0.1

A simple way to load fonts for matplotlib

PyFonts

A simple way to load fonts for matplotlib.

Check out the online documentation.

Table of content:

• Quick Start
• Find fonts
• Fonts in Matplotlib
• Other feature: download fonts

Installation

You can install pyfonts directly from PyPI with:

pip install pyfonts

Alternatively you can install the development version with:

pip install git+https://github.com/JosephBARBIERDARNAL/pyfonts.git

Quick start

from pyfonts import load_font
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

# load font
font = load_font(
    font_url="https://github.com/google/fonts/raw/main/apache/ultra/Ultra-Regular.ttf"
)

# check how the font looks on a minimalist example
fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(10, 6))
ax.text(
    x=0.5,
    y=0.5,
    s=f"What an easy way to load fonts, isn't it?",
    font=font,
    fontsize=20,
    ha="center",
)
plt.show()

How to find fonts?

Google font

There are many fonts available on the web. The easiest way to find one is to follow these steps:

• Browse Google Font website to find a font that you like. Let's say you want to use Amaranth.
• Go to Google font github repository and type the name of your desired font in the search bar. We find that Urbanist font file in Bold is named https://github.com/google/fonts/blob/main/ofl/amaranth/Amaranth-Bold.ttf.
• copy the url and add ?raw=true at the end, which gives us https://github.com/google/fonts/blob/main/ofl/amaranth/Amaranth-Bold.ttf?raw=true
• and that's it! Just pass this to load_font() to use it in your matplotlib charts

from pyfonts import load_font
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

font = load_font(
    font_url="https://github.com/google/fonts/blob/main/ofl/amaranth/Amaranth-Bold.ttf?raw=true"
)

fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(10, 6))
ax.text(
    x=0.5,
    y=0.5,
    s=f"Congrats, you now have a cool font!",
    font=font,
    fontsize=20,
    ha="center",
)
plt.show()

For the url to be readable by PyFonts when using a Github url, it must be in one of (the following 3 urls are completely equivalent):

• https://github.com/google/fonts/blob/main/apache/ultra/Ultra-Regular.ttf?raw=true
• https://github.com/google/fonts/raw/main/apache/ultra/Ultra-Regular.ttf
• https://raw.githubusercontent.com/google/fonts/raw/main/apache/ultra/Ultra-Regular.ttf

The recommended is the first (https://github.com/google/fonts/blob/main/apache/ultra/Ultra-Regular.ttf?raw=true) because you just need to add ?raw=true after the end of the Github url.

Other places for fonts

Github is the ideal place to find fonts under a free licence. You can find many fonts on the web. Just make sure that the licence of the font allows you to use it in your project.

You can find other fonts at:

• Awesome fonts
• Nerd fonts

PyFonts and Matplotlib

How it works

In order to work with any font, PyFonts creates a temporary file and uses this file to create a FontProperties object. Once the object has been created with your font, the program deletes the temporary file as it no longer needs it.

Different weight and style

When you load a font, you don't load all its extensions: bold, italic, thin etc, but only the one from the url. If you want to be able to use a font and its bold version, for example, you need to load both fonts:

from pyfonts import load_font
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

font = load_font(
    font_url="https://github.com/google/fonts/blob/main/ofl/amaranth/Amaranth-Regular.ttf?raw=true"
)
bold_font = load_font(
    font_url="https://github.com/google/fonts/blob/main/ofl/amaranth/Amaranth-Bold.ttf?raw=true"
)

fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(10, 6))
ax.text(
    x=0.5,
    y=0.5,
    s=f"Congrats, you now have a cool font!",
    font=font,
    fontsize=20,
    ha="center",
)
ax.text(x=0.5, y=0.3, s=f"And now it's bold", font=bold_font, fontsize=20, ha="center")
plt.show()

Other feature: download a font locally

If for some reason you want to store the fonts you're working with, simply use the download_font() function. It just needs the arguments font_url (as described above) and destination_path (where you want to store them, by default in the current directory).

You can suppress the output message by adding verbose=False to it.

from pyfonts import download_font

download_font(
    font_url="https://github.com/google/fonts/raw/main/apache/ultra/Ultra-Regular.ttf",
    destination_path="/Users/josephbarbier/Desktop/myfont.ttf",  # optional
)

Font installed at: /Users/josephbarbier/Desktop/myfont.ttf