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

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).