Vertical alignment of tick labels containing minus in font size other than 10 with usetex=True #17574

Bug report

Bug summary

When TeX is used to typset text, minus signs cause a vertical offset in tick labels for certain font sizes. This is related to #6323, which was fixed but only for given font sizes.

The problem with the fix in #16366 seems to be that it looks for character 0 in font "cmsy10". I am not an expert, but I think the 10 refers to the font size, and for example "cmsy8" is used for 8 pt font.

Code for reproduction

from matplotlib import pyplot as plt
fig = plt.figure(dpi=300)
plt.rc('text', usetex=True)
ax = fig.add_subplot(1,2,1)
plt.plot((-7.,0.,7.), (-1.,0.,1.), 'r-')
plt.rc('text', usetex=True)
ax = fig.add_subplot(1,2,2)
plt.plot((-7.,0.,7.), (-1.,0.,1.), 'r-')
plt.xticks(fontsize=8)
plt.yticks(fontsize=8)
plt.show()

Outcome

On the left (font size 10) axis labels are correctly aligned are whereas on the right (font size 8) those labels which contain a minus sign are noticably lower.

Matplotlib version

• Operating system: mac OS 10.15.4
• Matplotlib version: 3.2.1 (installed using pip, with Special-case usetex minus to zero depth. #16366 manually applied)
• Matplotlib backend module://ipykernel.pylab.backend_inline:
• Python version: 3.7.1
• Jupyter version (if applicable): 4.4.0