PR summary

Accidentally closed by force pushing, the new PR for review is #26376 and this old thread has all the history information

As mentioned in the previous PR, antialiasing will use rcParams["text.antialiased"] and the parameter antialiased for text() will have no effect.

Currently I'm solving this by passing the antialiasing state through MathTextParser. Want to know about your ideas about this.
From my perspective,

pros:

• minimum modification to existing code and tests

cons:

• in mathtext.py, the antialiased parameter in parse(self, s, dpi=72, prop=None, antialiased=None) should never be None and should be set to True or False by the caller. I make it a default argument because doing so will keep the existing code working - and it's less likely to make users confused because this is an internal API.

Side Note: I have completed only AGG backend. For Cairo backends, I didn't see an elegant way to do this - the mathtext is parsed through RendererCairo._text2path.mathtext_parser.parse(), and mathtext_parser is initialized as a vector(path) parser (because it's an attribute of _text2path) , which don't have the option to render with or without antialiasing. I'm not quite sure about Cairo backend should be used for rasterization, vector, either of them, or both, so want to know your ideas about whether we need to support math text antialiasing for Cairo.

PR checklist

• [n/a] "closes #0000" is in the body
• new and changed code is tested
• [n/a] Plotting related features are demonstrated in an example
• New Features and API Changes are noted with a directive and release note
• Documentation complies with general and docstring guidelines