PyFonts: a simple way to load fonts for matplotlib

⏱ Quick start

Before using pyfonts you need to install it. This can easily be done with pip:

pip install pyfonts

pyfonts has a main simple function:load_google_font(): load a font from Google font and return a matplotlib font object.

Basic use case of pyfonts

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from pyfonts import load_google_font

font = load_google_font("Cascadia Mono", weight="bold", italic=True)

fig, ax = plt.subplots()
ax.text(
  x=0.2,
  y=0.5,
  s="Hey there!",
  size=30,
  font=font # we pass it to the 'font' argument
)
plt.show()

How to find good fonts

The easiest way to find great is to

• browse Google Font
• copy the name of the font you like
• pass it to load_google_font("Font Name")

Then you can use the weight argument to control is the font should be bold or thin for example.

You can control if the font should be italic by specifying italic=True (default to False).

Fonts that are not on Google font

Since not all fonts are available on Google fonts, pyfonts provides a load_font() function that allows to load a font from any arbitrary url that points to a font file.

Most font files are on Github repositories. In order to load a font from a Github repository, you have to:

• Copy the url of that font file. Here we'll use this url from pyfonts Github repository:

https://github.com/JosephBARBIERDARNAL/pyfonts/blob/main/tests/Ultra-Regular.ttf

• Then we add ?raw=true at the end, which gives us:

https://github.com/JosephBARBIERDARNAL/pyfonts/blob/main/tests/Ultra-Regular.ttf?raw=true

Use load_font() by passing the font's URL.

Then, provide the output of load_font() directly to any matplotlib function that accepts a font, such as ax.text().

how to load a font with pyfonts

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from pyfonts import load_font

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

fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(10, 10), dpi=300)
ax.text(
    x=0.5,
    y=0.5,
    s=f"Amaranth font\nwith PyFonts!!!",
    font=font,
    fontsize=50,
    ha="center",
)
plt.show()

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:

Combine a normal font and a bold font with pyfonts

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from pyfonts import load_font

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

fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(6, 6), dpi=300)
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=25, ha="center")
plt.show()

Locally stored font

PyFonts also allows you to load a font file that you have on your own computer. You just have to give it the path to your font.

Load a locally stored font with pyfonts

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from pyfonts import load_font

font = load_font("path/to/myfont/Ultra-Regular.ttf")

fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(6, 6), dpi=300)
ax.text(
   x=0.5,
   y=0.5,
   s=f"Yet another way to load font",
   font=font,
   fontsize=18,
   ha="center",
)
plt.show()

Gallery of examples

Here are some examples of what you can do with PyFonts. Click on the images to see the code.

Waffle chart with nice theme and fonts

Lollipop chart with arrows

Minimalist style area chart

Going further

You might be interested in

• The official pyfonts documentation.
• The official github repo of pyfonts (⭐ give it a star!)
• Learn more on how matplotlib handle fonts
• How to draw arrows in matplotlib
• How to create beautiful annotation in matplotlib