cjw byte-sourcerer

How to add custom (or system) fonts to matplotlib on OS X

Matplotlib expects to find .ttf fonts on your system. Newer versions of OS X use .dfont files. Converting them is easy, and putting them in a proper font path is also easy. The user font path on OS X is ~/Library/Fonts/, and matplotlib will find fonts here.

First, install what you'll need:

matplotlib
fondu (port install fondu, or brew install fondu)

Then find your desired font file. For system font files, the easiest way to do this is in the FontBook application. You can open FontBook in your utlities folder. Then select your font of choice, right click on it, and select "Show in Finder". You'll need to know where it is. Many system fonts are in places like /System/Library/Fonts/...
Move to your user's font directory ~/Library/Fonts/.
Use fondu to convert the OS-X specific font file (ends with .dfont) to .ttf.

There are certain files created by particular editors, IDEs, operating systems, etc., that do not belong in a repository. But adding system-specific files to the repo's .gitignore is considered a poor practice. This file should only exclude files and directories that are a part of the package that should not be versioned (such as the node_modules directory) as well as files that are generated (and regenerated) as artifacts of a build process.

All other files should be in your own global gitignore file:

Create a file called .gitignore in your home directory and add any filepath patterns you want to ignore.
Tell git where your global gitignore file is.

Note: The specific name and path you choose aren't important as long as you configure git to find it, as shown below. You could substitute .config/git/ignore for .gitignore in your home directory, if you prefer.

A Quick and Dirty Lens primer

Why does Lens exist? Well, Haskell records suck, for a number of reasons. I will enumerate them using this sample record.

data User = User { login    :: Text
                 , password :: ByteString
                 , email    :: Text
                 , created  :: UTCTime
 }

	import Cocoa

	protocol AXUIProtocol {
	func AXUIWindowArray(processIdentifier pid:pid_t) -> [AXUIElement]
	func AXUIWindowArray(bundleIdentifier bid:NSString) -> [AXUIElement]
	}

	extension AXUIProtocol {
	func AXUIWindowArray(processIdentifier pid:pid_t) -> [AXUIElement] {
	let windowList : UnsafeMutablePointer<AnyObject?> = UnsafeMutablePointer<AnyObject?>.alloc(1)

	- (void)loadOrResizeOrSometing {
	/*
	* After creating the text view or resizing the font, set the quoteWidth and contentInset.
	*/
	WPTextContainer textContainer = (WPTextContainer)paragraphView.textContainer;
	textContainer.spaceWidth = [self widthForCharacter:@" "];
	textContainer.charWidths = @{
	@(8220) : @([self widthForCharacter:@"“"]),
	@(8216) : @([self widthForCharacter:@"‘"]),
	@('"') : @([self widthForCharacter:@"\""]),

	#
	# STL GDB evaluators/views/utilities - 1.03
	#
	# The new GDB commands:
	# are entirely non instrumental
	# do not depend on any "inline"(s) - e.g. size(), [], etc
	# are extremely tolerant to debugger settings
	#
	# This file should be "included" in .gdbinit as following:
	# source stl-views.gdb or just paste it into your .gdbinit file

	Latency Comparison Numbers (~2012)
	----------------------------------
	L1 cache reference 0.5 ns
	Branch mispredict 5 ns
	L2 cache reference 7 ns 14x L1 cache
	Mutex lock/unlock 25 ns
	Main memory reference 100 ns 20x L2 cache, 200x L1 cache
	Compress 1K bytes with Zippy 3,000 ns 3 us
	Send 1K bytes over 1 Gbps network 10,000 ns 10 us
	Read 4K randomly from SSD* 150,000 ns 150 us ~1GB/sec SSD