Math & special characters

Scientific and report figures lean on symbols that a body typeface never ships — arrows, operators, Greek, units, and the occasional ⚠ or ★. dartwork-mpl covers these two ways: a mathtext stack for $…$ expressions, and a plain-text fallback chain so bare symbols in labels and annotations render instead of turning into tofu (□). Both work out of the box under every preset; no configuration and no TeX install.

Mathtext (the $…$ stack)

Every preset sets mathtext.fontset: custom with all math roles mapped to Noto Sans Math, so inline math matches the sans body rather than switching to Computer Modern:

import dartwork_mpl as dm
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

dm.style.use("scientific")
fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=dm.figsize("9cm", "standard"))
ax.set_title(r"$x^2 + \alpha_i \geq \sqrt{\beta} \cdot \sum_n \frac{1}{n^2}$")

Any glyph outside Noto Sans Math’s coverage falls back to matplotlib’s built-in STIX fonts (mathtext.fallback: stix) — bundled with matplotlib itself, so it costs zero extra bytes and no math glyph hard-fails to a dummy box.

Plain-text symbols (labels, annotations, ticks)

You do not need $…$ for a single symbol in a label. dartwork-mpl’s font.family is an explicit fallback chain, so matplotlib resolves each character against it per glyph:

ax.set_ylabel("Δσ (‰)")
ax.annotate("≈ ±1.5 σ  →  ✓", xy=(0.5, 0.5))
ax.text(0.1, 0.9, "T ≥ 25 ℃  ⚠")

The guaranteed plain-text set — covered by the bundled chain under both the Latin and Korean presets — includes:

Group

Glyphs

Arrows

→ ← ↑ ↓ ⇒

Relations / operators

± × ÷ ≈ ≠ ≤ ≥ ∑ ∏ √ ∞ ∂ ∫

Units / misc

℃ ‰ µ Ω

Greek

α β γ σ

Mathematical alphanumeric

𝜎 𝑥

Dingbats

⚠ ✓ ★

How the fallback chain resolves them

matplotlib builds its per-glyph fallback list from font.family (an explicit family list — not the generic sans-serif alias, which would collapse to a single face). The bundled order is:

  1. Roboto / Inter — Latin body, most arrows and operators;

  2. Paperlogy / Noto Sans CJK KR / Pretendard — Korean, plus ℃ and broad symbol coverage;

  3. Noto Sans Math — Greek, mathematical-alphanumeric (𝜎, 𝑥), and the full operator set;

  4. Noto Sans Symbols / Noto Sans Symbols 2 — dingbats and technical symbols (⚠ ✓ ★).

Korean presets lead with Paperlogy but append the same math/symbol faces, so the symbol set is identical in report-kr and friends.

Full LaTeX is not bundled

Setting text.usetex: True routes typesetting through a local TeX installation (TeX Live / MacTeX and dvipng). dartwork-mpl does not bundle TeX — it is far too large to ship in a wheel — so usetex only works if you have TeX installed system-wide. For the vast majority of figures the mathtext stack above is enough and needs no external tools; reach for usetex only when you need a construct mathtext cannot express.