gnuplot: italics in a portion of a label

Question

Sorry for the (probably) basic question but I'm just getting started with gnuplot. What I'd like is to create an axis label with a portion of it in italics. Something like:

xlabel: Not italics, italics

I understand it's easy to set a label to display italics (set xlabel font "Times-Italic", 20), but is it possible to have only a portion of the label in italics?

Solution

Usually you can use the enhanced text mode to change the font for parts of a string:

set termoption enhanced
set xlabel "not italics, {/Times-Italic italics}"

Unfortunately, that behaviour is not supported by all terminals, see bold enhanced text in gnuplot and the related bug report #1240.

It works e.g. with the postscript and png terminals, but does not work with pngcairo and pdfcairo.

Comments

[Christoph]

Unfortunately, that depends on the terminal. For set terminal postscript eps enhanced you can use set xlabel "not italics, {/Times-Italic italics}". But other terminals like pdfcairo at the moment don't support font styles for the enhanced text mode, see also bold enhanced text in gnuplot. This was already reported as bug: sourceforge.net/p/gnuplot/bugs/1240.

[Reid]

You can also use {/:Italic foo} to avoid re-specifying the font name. This works in Gnuplot 5, but I'm not sure if it's new.

[alfC]

Works on pdf terminal too

[Christoph]

@reid That was introduced with version 5 and is indeed the way to go nowadays