15.2.8 Use of the interpreter Property

All text objects—such as titles, labels, legends, and text—include the property "interpreter" that determines the manner in which special control sequences in the text are rendered.

The interpreter property can take three values: "none", "tex", "latex". If the interpreter is set to "none" then no special rendering occurs—the displayed text is a verbatim copy of the specified text. Currently, the "latex" interpreter is not implemented and is equivalent to "none".

The "tex" option implements a subset of TeX functionality when rendering text. This allows the insertion of special glyphs such as Greek characters or mathematical symbols. Special characters are inserted by using a backslash (\) character followed by a code, as shown in Table 15.1.

Besides special glyphs, the formatting of the text can be changed within the string by using the codes

These codes may be used in conjunction with the { and } characters to limit the change to a part of the string. For example,

xlabel ('{\bf H} = a {\bf V}')

where the character 'a' will not appear in bold font. Note that to avoid having Octave interpret the backslash character in the strings, the strings themselves should be in single quotes.

It is also possible to change the fontname and size within the text

The color of the text may also be changed inline using either a string (e.g., "red") or numerically with a Red-Green-Blue (RGB) specification (.e.g., [1 0 0], also red).

Finally, superscripting and subscripting can be controlled with the '^' and '_' characters. If the '^' or '_' is followed by a { character, then all of the block surrounded by the { } pair is superscripted or subscripted. Without the { } pair, only the character immediately following the '^' or '_' is changed.