#347 also mentions the creation of a TextCollection.

Pull request #400 allows for arbitrary mathtext as the marker itself. That's almost a solution to this problem but not quite. It seems the functionality of this bug is more closely related to annotate() than anything else.

I'm not sure it fully covers the original request, but the ability to make paths from text (using TextPath) and the ability to make markers for scatter with Paths, means that you can make text markers. A simple example of this:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from matplotlib.text import TextPath

plt.scatter(range(3),  range(3), marker=TextPath((0, 0), 'f', size=10000), s=1000)
plt.show()

Pragmatically, there is little benefit to keeping this ticket (from 2005) hanging around, therefore I am closing.

I'd like to say that this issue isn't closed for me. The key issue is not the use of text markers per se, but the ability to specify the marker per scatter point. That is, I want to do something like this:

x = range(3)
y = range(3)
pyplot.scatter(x, y, marker=[str(a) + "," + str(b) for a, b in zip(x, y)])

To plot text "1,1" at (1,1), "1,2" at (1,2), etc. Just being able to make markers out of text isn't sufficient, because there's still no way to use multiple markers in a single scatter.

I'd like to say that this issue isn't closed for me.

Thanks for coming forward @BrenBarn. I have read and re-read the original request and it now seems to me that the functionality being requested is for a scattertext method on an axes, not for a text as the marker in a scatter plot.

From my limited understanding of the scatter function, there are optimisations which can be applied to some backends which provide a major performance improvement over the naive double for loop approach. These optimisations can boil down to the fact that some backends allow you to define a geometry once and use it in multiple locations. It is my belief that this is the reason the scatter function does not accept an array of n markers for n points, as it simply would not provide sufficient benefit over the naive approach (however <n distinct markers might). Based on this assertion, the scattertext functionality being requested would simply be a nested for loop along the lines of:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy 
ax = plt.axes()
xs = numpy.linspace(0, 1, 6)
ys = numpy.linspace(0, 1, 3)

ax.scatter(*numpy.meshgrid(xs, ys))
for x in xs:
    for y in ys:
       ax.text(x, y, '%s, %s' % (x, y) )

plt.show()

Given that there has been little to no progress in over 7 years, and that realistically the most likely way that a developer is going to implement such a thing is if they actually need such functionality too, I considered the issue redundant and hence closed it.

If anyone can see a performance benefit (or a benefit to users which outweighs the maintenance cost to mpl) of providing a vectorised interface (i.e. one that doesn't require naive for loops) to provide n distinct strings for n points, then I think a new ticket with a proposed interface and some implementation detail would be highly valuable.