Something wrong with italic fonts?

Description

I was trying to display mathematical texts (specifically alpha) with the matplotlib-supplied fonts but I couldn’t do it by setting pplt.rc['font.family'] = 'DejaVu Sans' and pplt.rc['mathtext.default'] = 'it'. Am I missing something here?

Aside from this behavior, personally, the default greek letters in proplot are not so pleasing. 'Fira Math' looks better but it isn’t so pleasing when the italic font is used (as shown below). Can we improve this?

Steps to reproduce

When italic font is selected, all alpha look the same. Is this the expected behavior?

import proplot as pplt
pplt.rc['mathtext.default'] = 'it'
fig, axs = pplt.show_fonts()

The above italic font in 'DejaVu Sans' looks different from the one in matplotlib.

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
plt.rcParams['font.size'] = 18

fig, ax = plt.subplots()

ax.text(.2, .9, 'regular')
ax.text(.6, .9, 'italic')

ax.text(.3, .7, r'$\mathrm{\alpha}$')
ax.text(.7, .7, r'$\alpha$')

Proplot version

3.4.3 0.9.5

[lukelbd]

And I finally remembered what I was thinking when I implemented this behavior: The idea was that the math text and string text should always be the same font, or else it could look “ugly”. So, users would be expected to change the plot-wide font to something more suitable for math if need-be, e.g. with pplt.rc['font.name'] = 'Fira Math'.

However, as you’ve shown, this is kind of frustrating / unexpected – the “aesthetic” benefits of forcing everyone to use the same font set for math and non-math text are outweighed by the practical issue that new proplot users are getting ugly math equations out-of-the-box. So, I will indeed remove this behavior.

[lukelbd]

#323 sets rc['mathtext.default'] = 'it' and uses the currently active font for math text by default rather than the global sans-serif font (meaning rc['font.name] = 'font' will also update the math text).