Problem
When plotting graphs where Chinese characters are present, the followng issue may happen
...Glyph 40857 (or other number) missing from current font.
This annoyed me several times when I deal with China’s data. I used to translate the variables into English to avoid this problem, but now I have to a visualization in Chinese, and decide to get rid of this problem forever.
Solution
Get a Chinese font
In Windows, the fonts are located in C:\Windows\Fonts\, find SimHei Regular in the files. Copy it and you have simhei.ttf on hand. Or you can simply find one online.
Get Matplotlib location
Execute the following commands in your jupyter notebook / any ide
import matplotlib
matplotlib.matplotlib_fname()
You will have the absolute path of matplotlibrc config file like
C:\ProgramData\Anaconda3\lib\site-packages\matplotlib\mpl-data\matplotlibrc
The fonts folder is located at the same level of matplotlibrc, to be more specific
C:\ProgramData\Anaconda3\lib\site-packages\matplotlib\mpl-data\fonts\ttf\
Copy simehi.ttf file into this folder.
Reload fonts
Run the following command once
from matplotlib.font_manager import _rebuild
_rebuild()
Set font dynamically
Add the following code every time before plotting
import matplotlib
# Set default font
matplotlib.rcParams['font.sans-serif'] = ['SimHei']
matplotlib.rcParams['font.family'] ='sans-serif'
# solve the problem that minus sign '-' is displayed as square
matplotlib.rcParams['axes.unicode_minus'] = False