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I'm new to PyMol (and StackExchange!) and working on my first project. I have the structure of a protein as an object, called PolyA-M, and the idea is that the residues of it are shown as spheres of differing sizes based on a calcualted conservation value. I want to label each sphere with it's amino acid, but to have the label size corresponding to sphere size. Here is a sample of the code that might be used to label one amino acid.

alter ( resid 138 ), resn = "Q135"
alter ( name CB and resid 138 ), vdw = vdw * 0.8 * 0.679934640522875
set_color col138, [ 1.0, 0.181, 0.181 ]
show spheres, name CB and resi 138
show sticks, ( name CA or name CB ) and resid 138
set label_size, 14, PolyA-M
label PolyA-M and name CB and resid 138, "Q"
color col138, name CB and resi 138

In this case, residue 138 is medium sized sphere with a size 14 label Q that fits well. However, if later on in the code another residue is labelled as so:

alter ( resid 198 ), resn = "A208"
alter ( name CB and resid 198 ), vdw = vdw * 0.8 * 0.359803921568627
set_color col198, [ 1.0, 0.601, 0.601 ]
show spheres, name CB and resi 198
show sticks, ( name CA or name CB ) and resid 198
set label_size, 8, PolyA-M
label PolyA-M and name CB and resid 198, "A"
color col198, name CB and resi 198

This will label residue 198 with a small A to fit the small sphere. However, this will also change the earlier label to size 8 as well, making it too small for the sphere.

Is there any way for me to prevent this, such that each residue keeps its own label size?

I know that one way is to create multiple identical objects and keep all labels of the same size restricted to the same object (For example, PolyA-M_10 contains all residues with label size 10, polyA-M_14 all residues with label size 14) but I was wondeirng if there is a more efficient way?

Thank you for any help! This is my first Stack Exchange question so any feedback would be appreciated :)

'label_size' is a object-state-level setting, which means that you will have to rely on the 'create' command to create a new object for every different label size.

It can certainly be automated, and for this I'd recommend getting into Pyhton Scripting for PyMOL

I ended up fixing this by just putting this into the boilerplate code:

copy PolyA-MC_4, PolyA-MC
copy PolyA-MC_6, PolyA-MC
copy PolyA-MC_8, PolyA-MC
copy PolyA-MC_10, PolyA-MC
copy PolyA-MC_12, PolyA-MC
copy PolyA-MC_14, PolyA-MC
copy PolyA-MC_16, PolyA-MC
copy PolyA-MC_18, PolyA-MC
copy PolyA-MC_20, PolyA-MC

This copied my object such that I had one per size of label text, and then each label was placed on the object. As all labels on a given object are the same size, it worked! e.g. for one residue the labelling is now:

set label_size, 4, PolyA-MC_4

Effectively, it's the same as what I was already doing, but instead of having ten copy filies in the directory only one is needed. Much easier for sending to people, and more efficient!