title: What's the benefit of text.usetex : True in matplotlib
body: <p>I'm intending to write a thesis and am beginning by setting up a standard Matplotlib file to control plot formatting. However, I'm having problems with the <code>text.usetex : True</code> option. In particular, it's irritating that the tick labels default to a serif font when all my figures should be sans-serif. Indeed - I set the font.family to sans-serif in the rcParams file but still see the problem, as identified in github <a href="https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/issues/1516/">here</a>.</p>
  
  <p>Additionally, other text looks different when I have <code>usetex</code> turned on or off - this seems surprising since I told matplotlib to use the same font each time.</p>
  
  <p>Therefore, I wonder what the actual benefit to using LaTeX rendering is? Since Matplotlib can already handle LaTeX commands in labels such as <code>xlabel('\alpha')</code> and can accept fonts to use by user input to the rcparams file, what does using LaTeX on the text do differently?</p>
  
  <p>To achieve my aim of a consistent sans-serif font, could I not just set font.sans-serif in matplotlib rcparams file to be the font I set as a sans-serif font in LaTeX?</p>
  
  <p>Thanks for any suggestions or hints!</p>