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?

Answer 1

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.