Matplotlib: Times New Roman appears bold

Question

For some reason when using Times New Roman in my mpl plots it appears bold. Other fonts are OK.

Here is a minimal example, and the result (inside a Word doc

Answer 1

Digging into more details I realized that the bug is real and that mpl is actually selecting a Times New Roman Bold font.

The font selection algorithm in font_manger.py assigns weights on every font it finds based on the family, variant, weight, etc. (around line 1290). The "name" coming from Times New Roman Bold.ttf is just 'Times New Roman' which might make sense, but the weight is 500, the same value as the regular font:

 with score 0.1
 with score 0.1

On my Mac and Linux setup the bold one is encountered first and is selected by the code

 if score < best_score:
     best_score = score
     best_font = font

I dirty patch is to replace < by <=...