Matplotlib supports the use of custom characters as markers, which now include mathtext and emoji. To use characters as custom markers, we concatenate two dollar signs '$', each in front of and behind the character, and we pass them as the marker parameter.
The notations starting with a backslash '', such as 'clubsuit', are in mathtext, which will be introduced later in this chapter (in the text and annotations section).
Here is an example of a scatter plot of markers in mathematical symbols and an emoji:
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from matplotlib.lines import Line2D
custom_markers = ['$'+x+'$' for x in ['$','\%','clubsuit','sigma','']]
for i,marker in enumerate(custom_markers):
plt.scatter(i%10,i,marker=marker,s=500) # plot each of the markers in size of 100
plt.show()
As seen from the following figure, we have successfully used symbols, a Greek alphabet, as well as an emoji as custom markers in a scatter plot: