Re: [matplotlib-devel] Different behaviour of mathtext and LaTeX rendering

There was a discussion on this list around a year ago about this.  The 
concern was that not rendering $ as $ would break (matplotlib) backward 
compatibility with scripts that don't care about math at all but use a 
lot of dollar signs (e.g. financial plots).  This is one of the few 
places where we deliberately broke usetex compatibility in favour of 
matplotlib compatibility.

That said, it's probably a bug that the escaped dollar sign in non-math 
context is not rendered as a dollar sign.

As a workaround "$\$%1.2f$" works with usetex on or off, with the 
proviso that it uses math- rather than text-rendering for the numbers.

Mike

Manuel Metz wrote:
>   I just noted that mathtext and LaTeX rendering behave differently 
> when using a single "$" character in a text string. This happened to 
> me when looking at the dollar_ticks example from the docs because I 
> use LaTeX rendering by default. The problem is here:
>
> formatter = ticker.FormatStrFormatter('$%1.2f')
>
> MathText interprets this as a single "$" character, whereas LaTeX 
> interprets this as starting character of a math expression (and I get 
> an error), i.e. I have to write "\$1.2f" instead, which then, however, 
> is interpreted by MathText as "\$" ... :-(
>
> Shouldn't these two behave equally here?
>
> mm