[Matplotlib-users] Using a picture as a legend label

[Michael C. <mic...@gm...>]

A typical plot for me includes some simple line curves and a legend
attempting to describe what apparatus that curve belongs to.  Often the
labels I give seem clear to me at the time, but even returning a month
later to the plot, I'll be as lost as the next guy.

A few of my colleagues have been plotting curves, and then including a
picture or diagram in place of a typical legend label.  The picture or
diagram is bordered by the color of the trace on the plot.  I am fairly
certain the plots are done in Matlab.  The diagrams are simply dropped into
a powerpoint deck and given a border that is matched as close as possible
to the trace.  I did some things like that back in graduate school.

Seems like it would be neat to have a way to do a legend in matplotlib that
does something like this.  I'm envisioning a regular axes with lines,
scatter plots, etc. to the left and a column of graphics to the right.  I
would think this would be fairly doable using GridSpec or some of the
similar layout.  The place I could see getting hung up would be adding a
color border to a picture that matches the trace and also doing the scaling
to make it work all dynamically for different numbers of traces.