Today I configured my current main plotting engines (R, Stata and Python) to use the Routed Gothic font. I choose the Narrow variant as it looks prettier for plotting purpose. I discovered this font thanks to Steve Losh, which he now uses with Gnuplot. I like this old design stuff a lot, but it’s definitively not the best font available for plotting as typography-centric themes (e.g., hrbrthemes) usually rely on good kerning and tabular figures. Anyway, I wanted to give it a try for a few weeks and see how it goes. After all it took me a long time to make up my mind to opt for JetBrains Mono after three years of Iosevka.

Using this font in R is not really a problem if you’re using ggplot2 since it comes as a TTF font. It can be used on the fly, when saving PDF files, or as a theming option. I had this in my .Rprofile:

.First <- function() {
  grDevices::quartz.options(width = 6, height = 6)
  grDevices::palette("Tableau10")
  theme_set(theme_light(base_family = "Routed Gothic Narrow"))
}

Stata can be configured to use any font you like in your Do-file editor, variable browser/editor, or in the main UI (command + results window). The default font and theme can also be defined for the graphic device. Below is a quick illustration of R and Stata output for the mtcars and auto datasets.

Adding a default font for matplotlib is actually a little bit trickier. I happened to do it as follows:

1. First, you need to copy the default matplotlibrc fiel if you haven’t one already under your ~/.matplotlib directory. For me, it was something like : cp /usr/local/lib/python3.8/site-packages/matplotlib/mpl-data/matplotlibrc .matplotlib.

2. Next, copy the *.ttf font files in the site-packages/matplotlib/mpl-data/fonts/ttf directory.

3. Finally, edit the matplotlibrc file to add the Routed Gothic Narrow font as the first item under the font.sans entry. Mine now looks as follows:

   font.sans-serif : Routed Gothic Narrow, DejaVu Sans, Bitstream Vera Sans, Computer Modern Sans Serif, Lucida Grande, Verdana, Geneva, Lucid, Arial, Helvetica, Avant Garde, sans-serif
   

   Then, you just have to launch ipython with the matplolib backend enabled and enjoy your new font settings.¹

I’m pretty there is a better option, but this works. That’s it.