Find out which font matplotlib uses

Question

Im looking for a nice way to get the name of the default font that is used by matplotlib.pyplot. The documentation indicates that the font is selected from the list in rcPar

Answer 1

To obtain the font family:

matplotlib.rcParams['font.family']

If it's a general font family like 'sans-serif', use fontfind to find the actual font:

>>> from matplotlib.font_manager import findfont, FontProperties
>>> font = findfont(FontProperties(family=['sans-serif']))
>>> font
'/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/Extras/lib/python/matplotlib/mpl-data/fonts/ttf/Vera.ttf'

I found this in the unit tests of the font_manager: https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/blob/4314d447dfc7127daa80fa295c9bd56cf07faf01/lib/matplotlib/tests/test_font_manager.py