Currently, per-atom labels are the easiest the create:

label elem n, "Nitrogen"

label name ca, resn+resi+chain

label

The fonts included with PyMOL 1.x are listed here with their identifiers.

• 5 - DejaVuSans (regular)
• 6 - DejaVuSans (italic)
• 7 - DejaVuSans (bold)
• 8 - DejaVuSans (bold italic)
• 9 - DejaVuSerif (regular)
• 10 - DejaVuSerif (bold)
• 11 - DejaVuMono (regular)
• 12 - DejaVuMono (italic)
• 13 - DejaVuMono (bold)
• 14 - DejaVuMono (bold italic)
• 15 - Gentium (regular)
• 16 - Gentium (italic)
• 17 - DejaVuSerif (italic)
• 18 - DejaVuSerif (bold italic)

PyMOL uses the UTF8 unicode encodings for special characters.

As of PyMOL 1.x, all scalable fonts (5-18) can display special characters such as Greek “alpha” and “beta” via unicode. However, the Angstrom symbol is missing from fonts 15 & 16.

set label_font_id, 15

# Alpha-Helix using greek Alpha character

label 12/ca, "\316\261-Helix"

# Beta-Sheet using greek Beta character

label 20/ca, "\316\362-Sheet"

set label_font_id, 17

label 6/ca, "5.0 \342\204\253"