Matplotlib cannot find basic fonts

Question

I am using matplotlib version 2.0.0 on Python 3 in a miniconda virtual environment. I am working on a unix scientific computing cluster where I don\'t have root privileges.

Answer 1

To get it to work, I had to combine the two current top answers. Here's what worked for me:

$ sudo apt install msttcorefonts -qq
$ rm ~/.cache/matplotlib -rf

Answer 2

I actually solved by

import matplotlib.font_manager

Answer 3

I was facing a similar issue in a Cloud Datalab docker image running on a gcloud VM. Executing the following fixed the issue for me:

$ sudo apt install msttcorefonts -qq
$ rm ~/.cache/matplotlib -rf

Here is instructions on how to get to the docker image running on the gcloud VM containing the Datalab instance just in case.

Answer 4

I had this exact same problem on a Vagrant VM running Ubuntu Xenial 64-bit. No matter how many fonts I had already installed, matplotlib was having a problem with the "system" font name "sans-serif". I fixed it by:

• Stopping Jupyter
• Installing font-manager: sudo apt install font-manager
• Cleaning the matplotlib cache directory: rm ~/.cache/matplotlib -fr
• Restarting Jupyter.

No more error messages about sans-serif.

Answer 5

try all the methods above, not work for me.

my way to solve this is a little dirrent cause I'm using conda on ubuntu server running jupyter

locate -b '\mpl-data'

find a folder

/usr/share/matplotlib/mpl-data

then I add the simhei fonts into the font folder in mpl-data . then remove matplotlib fonts cache

rm -rf ~/.cache/matplotlib

restart jupyter notebook, and it works.

Answer 6

It took me many hours to finally figure out that I needed to update matplotlib.

My original version of 3.0.3 (which came with my jupyter-datascience docker image) would give me this error, but updating to 3.1.1 fixed it.

In the end, my docker script:

RUN pip install matplotlib==3.1.1
COPY fonts /usr/share/fonts/truetype/
RUN fc-cache -fv
RUN rm /home/jovyan/.cache/matplotlib -rf

is what did it for me.