iirc it does so by scraping docstrings.

cc @WeatherGod

Yeah... it is pretty sad, really... IIRC, essentially, as each type of
artist is made, the docstrings for the artist is scraped for the alias
information. Therefore, this information is not in a common location
because it is specific to each type of Artist. It is merely a coincidence
that many artists share common aliases for various style properties.

Now, that is not to say that such an API wouldn't be highly welcomed...
, .

On Tue, Sep 9, 2014 at 4:03 PM, Thomas A Caswell notifications@github.com
wrote:

iirc it does so by scraping docstrings.

cc @WeatherGod https://github.com/WeatherGod

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#3490 (comment)
.

The referenced example in the OP is gone - for my understanding what does it look like?

Perhaps related: #1963

See https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/blob/master/lib/matplotlib/cbook.py#L2510

@tacaswell so, sounds like it exists but it's not used throughout. My search shows only axes/_axes.py as using it.

If we want to open up a new effort to start replacing the docstring scraping functionality, we should replace this issue with a fresh one

This is also tied to the traitlets work @rmorshea will be doing (so we can simply ask the artists what attributes they have).

For visitor reference, traitlets work sits at #4762

For future reference: Aliases and normalizing are currently implemented via the decorator @cbook._define_aliases and the function cbook.normalize_kwargs.