Bug summary

Thetext.usetex rcParam flag can be used to enableTeX rendering on all Text elements instead ofMathtext. When using the pgf backend, I would expect this flag to have no effect and for the Text elements to be rendered identically sincepgf also uses TeX to render.

The problem is that theusetex renderer seems to have a different implementation than thepgf renderer.

Code for reproduction

importmatplotlib.pyplotaspltimportmatplotlibasmplmpl.use('pgf')plt.rcParams.update({'figure.dpi':400,'text.usetex':True,# TODO: comment this out to get different results'ytick.labelsize':1,    })# Create the figure and axis objectsfig,ax=plt.subplots(figsize=(2,1.5))# Plot the datax= [1,2,3,4,5]y= [2,4,6,8,10]ax.plot(x,y)# Set the title and axis labelsax.set_title('My Plot')ax.set_xlabel('X-axis')ax.set_ylabel('Y-axis')# Save the plot to a fileplt.savefig('my_plot.png')plt.savefig('my_plot.pgf')

Actual outcome

Whentext.usetex isTrue, the tick labels use display math font to render in Tex.
Whentext.usetex isFalse, the tick labels use the regular text font to render in Tex.

Expected outcome

When using the pgf backend, I would expect enabling/disablingtext.usetex to have no effect on the output.

Additional information

From what I understand, thetext.usetex implementation has an unofficially supported rcParam for the preamble namedtext.latex.preamble. On the other hand, the pgf implementation has an officially supported rcParam for the preamble namedpgf.preamble. From the documentation it's unclear to me which renderer/preamble takes precedence when both pgf andusetex are enabled.

Thetext.usetex renderer also does not support XeLaTeX/LuaLaTeX according to the documentation.

In conclusion:
Is there any reason why these two rendering engines can not (or should not) be unified? I suspect this is also the root cause of a lot of confusion and consistency errors people have.

Related:
#28084

Operating system

Ubuntu

Matplotlib Version

3.7.5

Matplotlib Backend

pgf

Python version

3.8.10

Jupyter version

No response

Installation

pip