Mario Oschwald wrote: > Hello, > > first let me thank you for your excellent software - I think > it is just wonderful and very pleasant to use. > > Two small things came up when I installed 0.91.1 into > my home directory (I didn't want to mess with the debian > packages since they are usually very fast in updating them) > > This passage in the INSTALL file is misleading: > > Note that if you install matplotlib anywhere other than the default > location, you will need to set the MATPLOTLIBDATA environment > variable to point to the install base dir. > > > Instead of setting MATPLOTLIBDATA to the base dir I specified > with setup.py install --prefix /home/mo/mpl I had to set > it to > > /home/mo/mpl/lib/python2.4/site-packages/matplotlib/mpl-data/ > > for mathtext to find its fonts. Was that necessary? I routinely install matplotlib to a non-standard location, and have never set MATPLOTLIBDATA. If MATPLOTLIBDATA is not set, it appears that matplotlib will look for the "mpl-data" directory underneath the main matplotlib directory. (Which in your case is /home/mo/mpl/lib/python2.4/site-packages/matplotlib/). I'm curious if you get errors without specifying MATPLOTLIBDATA, and what the error is. Perhaps the INSTALL docs should be updated to clarify that you only need this if you install the data in a non-standard place *relative to* the source code... > Secondly this passage in matplotlib/mathtext.py > > 544 if cached_font is None: > 545 try: > 546 font = FT2Font(basename) > 547 except RuntimeError: > 548 return None The intent of this code is "if the font isn't found, use a dummy character." Since there are so many different font configurations, and they're all a little brittle, I thought it better to warn and fail gracefully than to fail completely (and users can always use the "-We" to fail on warnings.) Otherwise, we run the risk of having some plots not working on all installations (because of font limitations, etc.) However, the implementation isn't quite right because not all callers expect and deal with the 'None' result correctly. I have fixed this in -r4557. Can you please send a script that triggers this error, so I can ensure my patch corrects for it? Cheers, Mike -- Michael Droettboom Science Software Branch Operations and Engineering Division Space Telescope Science Institute Operated by AURA for NASA