So while many cases could be accommodated one way or another, this poses enough problems that I think we had better leave it as is. There's also the case where the user initially renders the plot into a div that's not attached to the DOM, and only attaches it later when the user requests that content - in that case there is no inheritance chain. So if the user were to render the plot and then change the font upstream, everything would be sized wrong. The other concern is layout: because this is SVG (rather than HTML which has a layout engine) we need to render text, measure it, then manually size boxes, margins, etc to fit the text. Even the 'Download plot as a png' button could break, as this renders the plot in a element that's not attached to the DOM. I'm hesitant to do that though, as 'inherit' breaks portability of the plot. generic-family: The name of a generic font-family, like 'serif' or. There are two types of font-family values: font-family: The name of a font-family, like 'verdana' or 'arial'. The browser will use the first value it recognizes. generic-family - The name of a generic-family, like 'serif', 'sans-serif', 'cursive', 'fantasy', 'monospace'. There are two types of font family names: family-name - The name of a font-family, like 'times', 'courier', 'arial', etc. If the browser does not support the first font, it tries the next font. There exist workarounds like window.getComputedStyle(my_div_element,null).getPropertyValue('font-family') and then get plotly.js to use the dynamically computed font-family, but it would be easier if plotly.js could inherit directly.įont-family: 'Open Sans ', verdana, arial, sans-serif Īnd it's possible that we could simply remove that, as long as we have set the font consistently across all internal elements. The fontFamily property sets or returns a list of font-family names and/or generic-family names for text in an element. The font-family property can hold several font names as a 'fallback' system. This is a stack overflow post apparently facing the same issue. Getting plotly.js output to inherit the font-family currently in use could maybe potentially be as simple as layout:, however this does not currently work as there seems to be a hard-coded value of 'Open Sans', verdana, arial, sans-serif still given by plotly.js as style attribute higher in the DOM tree (which is then inherited by the plotly.js-created elements actually having font-family: inherit).

In some cases plotly.js is used for making a plot, and the output is placed in a framework/context where the user controls the font in use. This works well in cases where you know the font-family to use up front. See this pen for an example of including custom font. We used the Facebook blue for the background color of the button, simply change the background-color attribute to match your site if needed.

Enabling a custom global font-family in a plotly.js plot is today possible using layout → font → family, which has default value 'Open Sans', verdana, arial, sans-serif. We used ‘font-family: inherit ’ to pick up whatever font you are using on your website, change the font family as necessary.

Button inherit font-family