[R] Italicize Greek symbols in axis

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Tue, 21 Jun 2011, Bingzhang Chen wrote:

> Hello there,
>
> Is there any way to italicize Greek symbols such as mu in axis? From the help
> files of mathematical anotations: "Note that bold, italic and bolditalic do not
> apply to symbols, and hence not to the Greek symbols such as mu which are
> displayed in the symbol font.  They also do not apply to numeric constants.", it
> seems that it cannot be done.

That refers to the mathematical symbol mu and not the Greek letter mu 
(it is not clear what you are actually quoting: maybe because in 
?plotmath 'symbols' is emphasized).  And ?plotmath goes on to say

   This can often be used to display Greek \emph{letters} in bold or italic.

Did you try that?  So see if  "\u03bc" works, e.g.

plot(1:10)
text(5, 2, "\u03bc", font = 3)

On most devices there is no italic symbol font, and even if it were 
available, it is not included in the R graphics model of fonts 1:5. If 
you do have such a font family, you should be able to set it up as the 
'family' argument of your (unspecified) graphics device.

Note that there is no italic version of the Adobe symbol font in the 
standard implementation of PDF nor postscript nor X11 nor in the 
Windows font set (and hence as far as I aware neither in the Apple 
version of those TrueType fonts).  Some devices, e.g. those using 
cairographics, may synthesize an italic symbol font from glyphs in 
non-symbol fonts.

Please do remember to include the 'at a minimum' information requested 
in the posting guide: much better answers to questions like this can 
be given if you specify the platform and graphics device you use.


> Thanks,
> Bingzhang Chen

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595