Once you’ve exported from matplotlib and opened your graph, you can change the font in a handful of different ways.

Changing the font for a single element

If you want to change the font for a single piece of text at a time, you need to select the element and change the font.

  1. Make sure the black or white selection arrow is selected.
  2. Click the text you’d like to change the font for.
  3. Using the Control Panel - the bar up top - select a new font from the list.

Selecting multiple elements and changing their font

If you want to change the font for multiple pieces of text - say, a single axis - you can do it two different ways. The video includes both methods, one after the other.

  1. Click and drag until the dotted marquee overlaps all of your text elements.
  2. Let go, and all of your text elements will be selected.
  3. Use the Control Panel up top to select a new font.

…or…

  1. Click one of your text elements.
  2. Hold down the shift key and click your remaining text elements. While holding shift, any new element you click is added to your selection.
  3. Once they are all selected, use the Control Panel up top to select a new font.

Changing all fonts at once

Let’s say I’ve imported my chart into Adobe Illustrator and don’t like BitstreamVeraSans Roman any more, I’d like to change it to something else everywhere. Changing all of the text in your visualization to a specific font is simple.

  1. Go to the Select menu, then Object and All Text Objects. This selects every text element on the page.
  2. Use the Control Panel - the bar up top - to select a new font from the list. It will update the font on all of your text elements.

Replacing a single font everywhere

Maybe I’m happy with my axis labels as Comic Sans, but I’d like to change the BitstreamVeraSans Roman that matplotlib automatically uses with something like Papyrus. You can use the Find Font... tool to replace just one font with another font.

  1. Go to the Type menu, then Find Font...
  2. Select the font you’d like to replace in the top section: we pick BitstreamVeraSans Roman
  3. Change “Replace with font from” to System if you don’t see the font you want in the bottom section.
  4. Select the replacement font in the bottom section.
  5. Click Change all and your fonts will be replaced.
  6. Click Done to close the menu.