Problem

Matplotlib has font settings for each font family. This makes it unnecessarily cumbersome to adopt a consistent appearance when using different families.

Proposed solution

Instead of specifying a font for every family, it would be handy to simply configure matplotlib to use a certain typeface, e.g. through a rc key font.typeface. matplotlib could then try to find the font matching font.typeface and the family specified by font.family.

For example, setting font.typeface = 'DejaVu' and font.family = 'sans' would resolve to DejaVu Sans. This would arguably make it easier to switch font families and stay within a given typeface for a consistent appearance. If no match is found, one could always fall back to the fonts listed in font.{family}.