matplotlib mac OSX 10.8 cuts off tick and axes labels

Question

My installation of matplotlib is appears to be cutting off the tick mark labels and truncating axes labels. For example, the code sample for the plot has y-axis values from 0 to 20. The vertical axis seems to only print the left most digit, or left most digit with sign, 0, 5, 1, 1, 2 where it should be 0.0, 5.0, 10.0, 15.0, 20.0. The vertical axis label prints 'Amplitu' where it should be 'Amplitude, arb' Changing the font size or scaling the plot with window stretching does not change the behavior. The python code:

from numpy import arange, sin, pi
from numpy import ma
from matplotlib.pyplot import  plot, show, title, xlabel, ylabel

t = arange(0.0, 2.0, 0.01)
s = 20*sin(2*pi*t)

plot(t,s,'g')
title("Sinewave Plot Example", fontsize=10)
xlabel("Elapsed Time, arb", fontsize=10)
ylabel("Amplitude, arb", fontsize=10)
show()

This seems to be an installation/configuration problem rather than a coding problem. The above should work fine.

I have installed matplotlib, on Mac OSX 10.8 Mountain Lion, with the following order

sudo pip install numpy
sudo pip install scipy 
sudo pip install matplotlib
Downloading/unpacking matplotlib
  Downloading matplotlib-1.2.0.tar.gz (36.9MB): 36.9MB downloaded
  Running setup.py egg_info for package matplotlib
    basedirlist is: ['/usr/local/', '/usr', '/usr/X11', '/opt/local']
    ============================================================================
    BUILDING MATPLOTLIB
                matplotlib: 1.2.0
                    python: 3.3.0 (v3.3.0:bd8afb90ebf2, Sep 29 2012, 01:25:11)
                            [GCC 4.2.1 (Apple Inc. build 5666) (dot 3)]
                  platform: darwin

    REQUIRED DEPENDENCIES
                     numpy: 1.7.0
                 freetype2: found, but unknown version (no pkg-config)

    OPTIONAL BACKEND DEPENDENCIES
                    libpng: found, but unknown version (no pkg-config)
                   Tkinter: Tkinter: version not identified, Tk: 8.5, Tcl: 8.5
                      Gtk+: no
                            * Building for Gtk+ requires pygtk; you must be able
                            * to "import gtk" in your build/install environment
           Mac OS X native: yes
                        Qt: no
                       Qt4: no
                    PySide: no
                     Cairo: no

    OPTIONAL DATE/TIMEZONE DEPENDENCIES
                  dateutil: matplotlib will provide
                      pytz: matplotlib will provide
                       six: matplotlib will provide

    OPTIONAL USETEX DEPENDENCIES
                    dvipng: no
               ghostscript: /bin/sh: gs: command not found
                     latex: no

    [Edit setup.cfg to suppress the above messages]

When I try to save the plot from the Mac window, .png file, the following error is generated by the python interpreter (3.3 w/ipython)

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.3/lib/python3.3/site-packages/matplotlib/backends/backend_macosx.py", line 475, in save_figure
    self.canvas.get_default_filename())
ValueError: character U+55002f is not in range [U+0000; U+10ffff]
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xd5 in position 0: invalid continuation byte

Thanks in advance for any insight you can provide!

Answer 1

It is a known bug. A solution might be to use Python 2.7.3.