in reply to
Changing the Font of a specific character in a Text in a Canvas
You can do that with Gtk2 (Gnome2::Canvas and Goo::Canvas) with it's pango markup; but with Tk you would have to string together a few createText, use the bbox on the text to properly position everthing. You must also consider the anchor. Here is an example, but I hard coded 9 into the position, you probably can figure out a way to compute it( maybe not :-) )
#!/usr/bin/perl
use Tk;
use strict;
my $mw=tkinit;
$mw->fontCreate('big',
-family=>'arial',
-weight=>'bold',
-size=>int(-24*24/14));
my $c = $mw->Canvas(-bg => 'white')->pack;
my $x = 0; my $y = 50;
my $t1 = $c->createText($x+50,$y,
-anchor=>'w',
-fill => 'red',
-font => 'big',
-text => '4',
);
my ($bx,$by,$bx1,$by1)= $c->bbox($t1);
print "$bx $by $bx1 $by1\n";
my $t2 = $c->createText ($bx1,$y+9, #computing 9 is difficult
-anchor=>'w',
# -font => 'big',
-fill => 'black',
-text=> '2');
($bx,$by,$bx1,$by1)= $c->bbox($t2);
print "$bx $by $bx1 $by1\n";
MainLoop;