Hi Patricia, Are you running PyFerret?  If so you will need to "set text/font=arial" or some other true font before those commands will work. yes? set text/font=ariel  ! Use a font other than the Hershey font yes? plot/title="Thickness of 37.01 <<> <&sigma>"/i=1:300 sin(i/20) ! or,  yes? plot/title="Thickness of 37.01 <#8804> <#963>"/i=1:300 sin(i/20) Where you can look up special-character numbers in one of the html symbol references, http://ferret.pmel.noaa.gov/Ferret/documentation/users-guide/commands-reference/SET#pyferret_embedded_symbols . The method is different for the Hershey font, which is the only font in Ferret, and is the default font in PyFerret.  There are all kinds of little details.  Labels in Ferret use an ASCII font, in which special characters are just rendered as themselves.  This means that for instance text which contains underscores doesn't get turned into a subscript. But also in ASCII fonts, the @ sign is not parsed as a font change but just written into the label as the @ sign. So, start in a Roman font, change to the math font, change back to the Roman font, then the Greek one. The Symbol fonts use the number to choose the character to plot.  It seems that the Character fonts want to be addressed using a Letter equivalent, not the number.  (Look in the table for one of the alphabetical text fonts such as SR, see that 115 is "s", and use that.  This is something I didn't know about the character fonts!) yes? set text/font=hershey ! only use this in PyFerret yes? plot/title="@SRThickness of 37.01 @IM32@SR @CGs"/i=1:300 sin(i/20) And all of this is one of the little places where we're really happy to be moving towards PyFerret. -Ansley On 9/21/2016 9:07 AM, Patricia Handmann wrote: Hi, I tried all of these: ppl title,0.2,Thickness of 37.01 lt $\sigma_2$ ppl title,0.2,Thickness of 37.01 lt \sigma_2 ppl title,0.2,Thickness of 37.01 @IM < @CG \sigma_2 @AS ppl title,0.2,Thickness of 37.01 @IM< @CGs_2 ppl title,0.2,Thickness of 37.01 @IM32 @CGs@AS_2 ppl title,0.2,Thickness of 37.01 @IM32 @AS @CGs ppl title,0.2,Thickness of 37.01 @IM32 @CG115 ppl title,0.2,Thickness of 37.01 @IM32 @CL @CG115 @CL @AS ppl title,0.2,Thickness of 37.01 @IM32 @CG115 @AS But none of them worked. Do you have another tip for me? Thanks for your time, Patricia Am 20.09.2016 um 17:58 schrieb Ansley C. Manke : Hi Yes, there are two methods, depending on which program you're running.  See "Fonts" in the Ferret documentation. The methods for Ferret and PyFerret are different. In PyFerret you have a very wide choice of fonts and special characters; in Ferret there are several families of special character fonts to choose from. -Ansley On 9/20/2016 3:06 AM, Patricia Handmann wrote: Dear ferreters, Is it possible to write greek letters and mathematical symbols in a title of a plot? ppl title,0.2,Thickness of 0 < \sigma_2 < 36.78 where \sigma_2 is supposed to show up as small greek sigma with an sub-index of 2. Thanks for your help. --------------------------------------------------------- Dipl.-Phys. Patricia Handmann  Physikalische Ozeanographie GEOMAR Helmholtz-Zentrum für Ozeanforschung Kiel  Düsternbrooker Weg 20 24105 Kiel, Germany --------------------------------------------------------- Tel. +49-431-600-4106 Room 128 phandmann@xxxxxxxxx www.geomar.de ---------------------------------------------------------