How to change fonts in matplotlib (python)?

It sounds as an easy problem but I do not find any effective solution to change the font (not the font size) in a plot made with matplotlib in python.

I found a couple of tutorials to change the default font of matplotlib by modifying some files in the folders where matplotlib stores its default font - see this blog post - but I am looking for a less radical solution since I would like to use more than one font in my plot (text, label, axis label, etc).

Say you want Comic Sans for the title and Helvetica for the x label.

csfont = {'fontname':'Comic Sans MS'}
hfont = {'fontname':'Helvetica'}

plt.title('title',**csfont)
plt.xlabel('xlabel', **hfont)
plt.show()

You can also use rcParams to change the font family globally.

 import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
 plt.rcParams["font.family"] = "cursive"
 # This will change to your computer's default cursive font

The list of matplotlib's font family arguments is here.

I prefer to employ:

from matplotlib import rc
#rc('font',**{'family':'sans-serif','sans-serif':['Helvetica']})
rc('font',**{'family':'serif','serif':['Times']})
rc('text', usetex=True)

The last line ensures that tick labels are also in the correct font.

import pylab as plb
plb.rcParams['font.size'] = 12

or

import matplotlib.pyplot as mpl
mpl.rcParams['font.size'] = 12