matplotlib显示有效，而savefig对于Unicode失败

Question

The following code produces the correct plot with plt.show() but fails when saved into a pdf or png image.

I have tried various suggestions (see commented lines) in similar questions, but none of them works for this case. Png file shows the unicode characters as boxes while pdf simply ignores them.

##-*- coding: utf-8 -*-
#from matplotlib import rc
#rc('font', **font)
#rc('font',**{'family':'sans-serif','sans-serif':['Helvetica']})
#rc('font',**{'family':'serif','serif':['Palatino']})
#rc('text', usetex=True)
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

plt.figure()
plt.plot(range(10))
plt.xlabel(u"\u2736")
plt.ylabel(u'\u03c4') 
plt.savefig('unicode.pdf')
plt.savefig('unicode.png')
#plt.show()

Answer 1

You were nearly there when you tried changing the font family.

Only certain fonts support unicode characters. You can check which fonts you have installed via:

import matplotlib.font_manager as fm
set([f.name for f in fm.fontManager.ttflist])

Then change to a unicode font, eg DejaVu Sans in Linux, Arial Unicode MS for Windows, Lucida Grande for Mac OS X, more on Wiki . No need to use tex:

plt.rcParams['font.family'] = 'DejaVu Sans'