title: Accented characters in Matplotlib
body: <p>Is there a way to get Matplotlib to render accented chars (é,ã,â,etc)?</p>
  
  <p>For instance, I'm trying to use accented characters on <code>set_yticklabels()</code> and Matplotlib renders squares instead, and when I use <code>unicode()</code> it renders the wrong characters.</p>
  
  <p>Is there a way to make this work?</p>
  
  <p>It turns out you can use u"éã", but first you have to set the file encoding:</p>
  
  <pre><code># Using the magic encoding
  # -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>After that Matplotlib correctly renders</p>
  
  <pre><code>u"é"
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I also learned that you can use</p>
  
  <pre><code>import matplotlib.font_manager as fm
  fp1=fm.FontProperties(fname="/path/to/somefont.ttf")
  ax.title("é",fontproperties=fp1)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>in case you need to render a characters that Matplotlib does not have.</p>