UPDATE: this issue has been resolved in newer versions (>5.0) of gnuplot; see @andyras' answer.
I am having difficulty getting gnuplot to create labels with bold and enhanced text in non-postscript terminals. The following script
#!/usr/bin/env gnuplot
reset
set terminal pdfcairo enhanced color lw 3 size 3,2 font 'Arial-Bold'
set output 'output.pdf'
set tics scale 0
plot -x title 'normal text', \
-2*x t 'enhanced_{text}', \
-3*x t '{/Arial-Bold attempt to specify_{font}}'
set terminal pngcairo enhanced color lw 3 size 400,300 font 'Arial-Bold'
set output 'output.png'
replot
set terminal postscript enhanced color lw 3 size 6,4 font 'Arial-Bold'
set output 'output.eps'
replot
reset
Produces the following eps (converted to png with convert output.eps -rotate 90 outputeps.png
):
which is fine. However, when I use the pdf or png terminals the result looks like this:
Note that while all the label text should be bold, only the label without any enhanced text is bold. In addition, when I try to manually specify the font (last line title) the font is different (reverts to the default?).
Is this behavior I should expect when not using the postscript terminal? Is there another way to specify fonts (i.e. is the naming scheme different outside of postscript)?
Best Answer
Since version 5.0, gnuplot has a new syntax to handle this issue:
These brackets can also be nested.