writing greek letters with subscripts with matplotlib

Question

I have to use greek letter with subscript as axes label, so i thought to use Latex symbols. I am using the following code:

from matplotlib import rc
rc('font',**{'family':'sans-serif','sans-serif':['Helvetica']})
rc('text', usetex=True)

and in the plot I have, for example:

ylabel(r'$\boldsymbol{\delta_y}$')

It works fine, it is just slow (it take about 5 sec. to make a plot), I guess it is bacause python has to call an external package.

Any chances I can make it faster?

I am using python 2.6

Answer 1

Try using rc('text', usetex=False) .

With this matplotlib will use the internal mathtext instead of your OS's latex installation to render math symbols. See the docs .