Thread: [Matplotlib-users] Encoding Issue on Linux

I am using the AGG backend and I am having issues with displaying unicode
characters in MPL on a Linux box. Instead of the actual character I see only
a placeholder/square symbol. E.g. the following command 

text(0.5, 0.5, u'\u03bb')

correctly shows the small greek letter lambda on my windows machine, but on
Linux, I get only a placeholder. I also tried

text(0.5, 0.5, u'\u03bb'.encode('utf8'))

and some other encodings but the result is the same. The python default
encoding is UTF-8 on both systems.

Is this maybe due to the font not being able to display this character (not
sure whether different fonts are used on different OSs) or am I making some
encoding mistake?

Thanks in advance,
Sascha

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On my linux box (Debian Sarge, Python 2.3, Matplotlib 0.82) the first 
example, text(0.5, 0.5, u'\u03bb'), correctly shows a lambda, but the 
second, text(0.5, 0.5, u'\u03bb'.encode('utf8')), only shows 2 small 
boxes. Perhaps you do not have all the required fonts installed?

> On my linux box (Debian Sarge, Python 2.3, Matplotlib 0.82) the first 
> example, text(0.5, 0.5, u'\u03bb'), correctly shows a lambda, but the 
> second, text(0.5, 0.5, u'\u03bb'.encode('utf8')), only shows 2 small 
> boxes. Perhaps you do not have all the required fonts installed?

I am not sure what fonts need to be installed. Actually I thought Matplotlib
brings its own fonts... 

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