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https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=477445
--- Comment #10 from Nicolas Mailhot nicolas.mailhot@laposte.net 2009-07-07 10:20:37 EDT --- (In reply to comment #9)
Unfortunately now Matplotlib doesn't work properly with STIX fonts (as included in the upstream matplotlib package for scientific graphs) since the Fedora supplied ones are in OpenType format rather than TTF (as supplied by Matplotlib).
Stix upstream is OpenType CFF only. They've promised to look at OpenType TT in the next version, but who knows when it will be released. So our Stix font packages are unlikely to include OpenType TT any time soon (and even if Stix finaly releases OpenType TT versions I don't think we really want to package two versions of the same fonts, they are huge and that only encourages app authors not to fix their font support. CTAN made the mistake of encouraging the packaging of fonts in multiple formats and as a result is stuck with all of them since now people got used not having to support newer formats).
In the very short term the matplotlib maintainer will probably have to package the built-in Stix TTFs as proper matplotlib font subpackages. But do remember this is not a sustainable workaround since it has the exact same drawbacks as private libs and we'll ask to kill them in later Fedora releases.
Matplotlib is unable to do font subsetting on OTF fonts
Well, that's a big matplotlib issue, OpenType CFF is one of the three major modern font formats (with OpenType TT and Apple AAT, but rumors are Apple is realising it can't sustain AAT alone when everyone else chose OpenType), and it's the default in many font creation tools, so it will become more and more common.
Please work with upstream so they fix their font backend (or switch to modern font libs such as fontconfig/cairo/poppler that can handle modern fonts)
and it's fallback option of including the whole font doesn't appear to work (the resulting PDF doesn't have any text...).
That's strange since Opentype CFF is Adobe's child as PDF, so it's probably the most PDF-friendly modern font format. But Stix does all kinds of unusual and complex things. It's not a simple font set (all the more reason not to ship different variants that will have subtle conversion problems)