Original report at SourceForge, opened Tue Jul 5 11:51:10 2005

use the sample/index number, or a tuple of strings, as a plotting symbol
in a scatter plot, with optional dot marker. text alignment options should
at least be left,bottom or left,middle (useful with dot marker) and
center-middle (no dot markers). distance between marker and text might
also be an option?

an example of this
http://www.tomasoberg.com/qspr/pca.gif

As discussed on the matplotlib-users mailing-list:
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=12243982

Quote, John Hunter:
Yes, you could do this, but it would take a bit of work to get
everything right. Basically, you would like to add string symbol
markers to scatter, and have them colored with colormaps and support
variable sizeing as well, right? The right way to do this, I think,
would be to implement a TextCollection, following the examples in
collections.py. Otherwise it would be extremely slow for large
numbers of markers. This would be a useful class anyhow to support
drawing of text with shared property (eg tick labels) since text
drawing is slow and is a bottleneck in some applications.