Styling part of label in legend in matplotlib

Question

Is it possible to have part of the text of a legend in a particular style, let's say, bold or italic?

Answer 1

Write between $$ to force matplotlib to interpret it.

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt  plt.plot(range(10), range(10), label = "Normal text $\it{Italics}$") plt.legend() plt.show() 

Answer 2

As silvado mentions in his comment, you can use LaTeX rendering for more flexible control of the text rendering. See here for more information: http://matplotlib.org/users/usetex.html

An example:

import numpy as np import matplotlib.pyplot as plt from matplotlib import rc  # activate latex text rendering rc('text', usetex=True)  x = np.arange(10) y = np.random.random(10) z = np.random.random(10)  fig = plt.figure() ax = fig.add_subplot(111) ax.plot(x, y, label = r"This is \textbf{line 1}") ax.plot(x, z, label = r"This is \textit{line 2}") ax.legend() plt.show() 

Note the 'r' before the strings of the labels. Because of this the \ will be treated as a latex command and not interpreted as python would do (so you can type \textbf instead of \\textbf).