Ubuntu running `pip install` gives error 'The following required packages can not be built: * freetype'

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When performing pip install -r requirements.txt, I get the following error during the stage where it is installing matplotlib:

REQUIRED DEPENDENCIES AND EXTENSIONS
                 numpy: yes [not found. pip may install it below.]
              dateutil: yes [dateutil was not found. It is required for date
                        axis support. pip/easy_install may attempt to
                        install it after matplotlib.]
               tornado: yes [tornado was not found. It is required for the
                        WebAgg backend. pip/easy_install may attempt to
                        install it after matplotlib.]
             pyparsing: yes [pyparsing was not found. It is required for
                        mathtext support. pip/easy_install may attempt to
                        install it after matplotlib.]
                 pycxx: yes [Couldn't import.  Using local copy.]
                libagg: yes [pkg-config information for 'libagg' could not
                        be found. Using local copy.]
              freetype: no  [pkg-config information for 'freetype2' could
                        not be found.]

...

The following required packages can not be built:

                    * freetype

Shouldn't pip install -r requirements.txt also install freetype? How should freetype be installed in Ubuntu 12.04 so it works with matplotlib?

pip python-2.7 matplotlib ubuntu python
10 Answers

This command sudo apt-get install libfreetype6-dev failed for me on ubuntu 16.04,
The following packages have unmet dependencies: libfreetype6-dev : Depends: libfreetype6 (= 2.6.1-0.1ubuntu2) but 2.6.1-0.1ubuntu2.3 is to be installed

So I downloaded installed freetype from the source, credit to this guide

$ tar -xvjf freetype-x.y.tar.bz2  # extract the downloaded version file
$ cd freetype-x.y/ 
$ ./configure
$ make
$ sudo make install

switched to virtualenv and pip install matplotlib and everything is working.

user_64731750

I followed James Mills' answer to install freetype. But still, although freetype was installed, the program was still failing. I believe this was because the program was not able to find the path of freetype. The following command solved the issue.

sudo apt-get install pkg-config

I found this solution on https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/issues/3029/

user_133417200
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