Hi all, I wrote up a very simple wrapper to do textual annotations directly using Freetype. This allows, for instance, adding annotations to image buffers created by fixed resolution buffers, volume rendering, etc. It should, eventually, also allow us to make a subset of plots with colorbars without using Matplotlib. Anyway, I've already added freetype to the yt build system. Additionally, matplotlib requires it. So it *should* already exist on the system, although I've had to add some guesswork to get the yt build system (not the install script) to link against the freetype wrappers. I've bundled up the changes and attached them to this email. It would be amazing if I could have a couple people try unbundling these changes, updating to hash 2f9479b4f1dd, re-cythonizing and attempting a build. This process should look something like: hg unbundle freetype.hg hg up -C 2f9479b4f1dd cython yt/utilities/amr_utils.pyx python setup.py build_ext -i Testing this will help to make sure that we can push the new freetype module out into the wild, and use it more generally for annotating volume rendering, etc etc. You can see the (documented!) function as "annotate_image" which should be in mods, and which accepts a bitmap (as, for instance, output by write_image) as input. Any reports of success/failure would be great. Thanks! -Matt