How to typeset in bold letters with `annotate!()` using Plots

General Usage
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1

How would I get a Bold font type in the annotate!() function using Plots with the GR backend?

2

Have you tried using bold LaTeXStrings?
Similarly to this example.

3

MWE:

using LaTeXStrings, Plots; gr()
plot(sin)
str = "I\\ am\\ bold"
annotate!(0, 0, L"\textbf{%$str}")

Plots_gr_annotate_bold_LaTeXStrings
Plots_gr_annotate_bold_LaTeXStrings3600×2400 164 KB

4

Thanks.
I tried to avoid LaTeXStrings.

  1. Is there a way to use the default GR sans serif font with LaTeXStrings?
  2. Is there a way around this?
5

You could use bold Unicode characters, if your font supports them:

julia> boldstring(s::AbstractString) = map(c -> 'a' ≤ c ≤ 'z' ? c + ('𝐚'-'a') : 'A' ≤ c ≤ 'Z' ? c + ('𝐀'-'A') : c, s)
boldstring (generic function with 1 method)

julia> boldstring("The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.")
"𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐪𝐮𝐢𝐜𝐤 𝐛𝐫𝐨𝐰𝐧 𝐟𝐨𝐱 𝐣𝐮𝐦𝐩𝐞𝐝 𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐫 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐥𝐚𝐳𝐲 𝐝𝐨𝐠."

(This only gives you bold with [A-Za-z], of course. You can do accented characters too if you first normalize the string s to NFD.)

6

This is Plots’ best friend. For consistency, you should use fontfamily = "Computer Modern"

7 
using Plots
gr()
plot(sin)
str = "I am bold"
annotate!(0, 0, (str, "Helvetica Bold"))

myplot

2 Likes
8

Excellent.
Here is the list of GR bold fonts for reference.

1 Like
9

Thank you all for the different takes on the topic.