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