Re: [Matplotlib-users] Changing size of markers in legend??

[John H. <jdh...@ac...>]

>>>>> "kristen" == kristen kaasbjerg <co...@ya...> writes:

    kristen> Hello John I was wondering how to change the size of a
    kristen> point marker in legend.  I only plot single points like:

    kristen> h1 = plot([1],[2],'ro') h2 = plot([3],[4],'go')
    kristen> legend((h1,h2),('1','2'), numpoints = 1)

    kristen> but the marker 'o' comes out quite small in the legend.
    kristen> Is there an easy way to enlarge it ??

See help(legend), specifically the markerscale kwarg

 markerscale = 0.6     # the relative size of legend markers vs. original

    kristen> By the way, why aren't things like fontsize,
    kristen> Frame=True/False etc legend kwargs ?? It would be much
    kristen> easier to change them this way compared to what you have
    kristen> shown in legend_demo.py. But, I guess there is a sensible
    kristen> reason for this.

You can pass in a kwarg 
   
  prop = FontProperties(size='smaller')  # the font properties

to control the font property.  See
http://matplotlib.sf.net/matplotlib.font_manager.html#FontProperties
for more information

As a general answer to your question, there are simply too many things
to customize to make them all kwargs.  We would have to add all the
properties of the frame, all the properties of the markers, all the
properties of the text, and these would be ambiguous since they all
derive from the base Artist class and hence properties like "visible"
which apply to all artists would be ambiguous.  matplotlib Artists
have a lot of configurable properties (eg for the frame alone)

In [5]: frame = leg.get_frame()
 
In [6]: get(frame)
    alpha = 1.0
    antialiased or aa = True
    clip_on = False
    edgecolor or ec = k
    facecolor or fc = w
    figure = <matplotlib.figure.Figure instance at 0x41a9ecac>
    fill = 1
    height = 0.0123998966675
    label =
    linewidth or lw = 1.0
    transform = <Affine object at 0x84b7cec>
    verts = ((0.89123573200992556, 0.96760010333247226), (0.89123573200992556, 0.97999999999999998), (0.97999999999999998, 0.97999999999999998), (0.97999999999999998, 0.96760010333247226))
    visible = True
    width = 0.0887642679901
    window_extent = <Bbox object at 0x84316ec>
    x = 0.89123573201
    y = 0.967600103332
    zorder = 1

and it would be tedious and difficult to maintain to expose all of
these in the kwarg interface.

JDH