Specifying text language

OpenType fonts may support language systems which can be used to select different typographic conventions, e.g., localized variants of letters that share a single Unicode code point, or different default font features. The text API now supports setting a language to be used and may be set/get with:

• matplotlib.text.Text.set_language / matplotlib.text.Text.get_language

• Any API that creates a Text object by passing the language argument (e.g., plt.xlabel(..., language=...))

The language of the text must be in a format accepted by libraqm, namely a BCP47 language code. If None or unset, then no particular language will be implied, and default font settings will be used.

For example, Matplotlib's default font DejaVu Sans supports language-specific glyphs in the Serbian and Macedonian languages in the Cyrillic alphabet (vs Russian), or the Sámi family of languages in the Latin alphabet (vs English).

fig = plt.figure(figsize=(7, 3))

char = '\U00000431'
fig.text(0.5, 0.8, f'\\U{ord(char):08x}', fontsize=40, horizontalalignment='center')
fig.text(0, 0.6, f'Serbian: {char}', fontsize=40, language='sr')
fig.text(1, 0.6, f'Russian: {char}', fontsize=40, language='ru',
         horizontalalignment='right')

char = '\U0000014a'
fig.text(0.5, 0.3, f'\\U{ord(char):08x}', fontsize=40, horizontalalignment='center')
fig.text(0, 0.1, f'Inari Sámi: {char}', fontsize=40, language='smn')
fig.text(1, 0.1, f'English: {char}', fontsize=40, language='en',
         horizontalalignment='right')

(Source code, 2x.png, png)