How to display Chinese in matplotlib plot

My work-around is like this:

import pandas as pdimport matplotlib.pyplot as pltimport matplotlib.font_manager as fmfont = fm.FontProperties(fname='c:\\windows\\fonts\\simsun.ttc')  # speicify fontax = most_active_posts.plot(x = 'title',y = 'active_span',kind = 'barh')ax.set_xticklabels(most_active_posts['title'].str.decode('utf-8'), fontproperties=font)plt.show()

Basically, you need to specify a valid font for Chinese characters.

I find a python library designed for fixing Chinese display in pip. You can download it using the command in your terminal:

pip install pyplotz

And you can write the following code instead(full code):

from pyplotz.pyplotz import PyplotZpltz = PyplotZ()pltz.enable_chinese()most_active_posts.plot(x='title',y='active_span',kind='bar')pltz.xticks(np.arange(len(df.cn)),df.cn,rotation=360)pltz.legend()pltz.show()

The result is like this

And it can help you handle matplotlib Chinese font for you! This is the github page:

https://github.com/201528015329004/pyplotz

And there are some handy examples:

https://github.com/201528015329004/pyplotz/blob/master/examples/quick_start.ipynb

1. Enter the directory Lib\site-packages\matplotlib\mpl-data, and edit the file matplotlibrc.
2. Locate font.family and font.sans-serif then uncomment both of them and inset Microsoft YaHei after font.sans-serif.