title: how to annotate heatmap with unicode text using matplotlib?
body: <p>I'm actually trying out the solution presented in <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11917547/how-to-annotate-heatmap-with-text-in-matplotlib">how to annotate heatmap with text in matplotlib?</a> . Although this actually works fine with numbers; I've been trying to do the same with unicode text and the problem is, although simple text is printed out fine, more exotic ones (like greek) are not. I've tried encoding and decoding with a bunch of codecs ('utf-8-sig','cp737','cp1252',etc) but the problem still remains. Any ideas? I'm using windows7 and python 3.3.
  Using the following code will reproduce the problem.</p>
  
  <pre><code># -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
  import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
  import numpy as np
  fig5, ax5a = plt.subplots()
  data = np.random.rand(5, 4)
  heatmap = ax5a.pcolor(data,cmap=plt.cm.Blues)
  commUrlCategoryHeatmap = {0: {0: 'νεα',1: 'news',2: 'νεα',3: 'news',4: 'νεα'},
                            1: {0: 'news',1: 'νεα',2: 'news',3: 'νεα',4: 'νεα'},
                            2: {0: 'news',1: 'νεα',2: 'Ειδήσεις και ΜΜΕ',3: 'νεα',4: 'news'},
                            3: {0: 'νεα',1: 'νεα',2: 'news',3: 'Periódicos',4: 'Ειδήσεις και ΜΜΕ'},
                            4: {0: 'νεα',1: 'news',2: 'νεα',3: 'news',4: 'Ειδήσεις και ΜΜΕ'}}
  for y in range(data.shape[0]):
      for x in range(data.shape[1]):
          print(commUrlCategoryHeatmap[y][x].encode('utf-8').decode('utf-8-sig'))
          plt.text(x + 0.5, y + 0.5, commUrlCategoryHeatmap[y][x].encode('utf-8').decode('utf-8-sig') ,horizontalalignment='center',verticalalignment='center',fontsize = 10, rotation = 35)
  plt.colorbar(heatmap)
  plt.show()
  </code></pre>