Add support for arbitrary unicode labels

[jbednar]

It would be nice to be able to easily do something like this example originally from Tony Fast:

where each marker is a Unicode character. This could be supported for Points by allowing something like unicode_marker=u'xxx' (can't use just marker because of ambiguity with mpl's s, o, etc. symbolic names), or marker_index='field' along with markers=u'yyy', where 'yyy' would be a string of Unicode characters to use, in order.

[jlstevens]

The latter option would make sense to me.

I don't quite understand the second suggestion, why would marker_index be better or clearer?

[jbednar]

It's two different usages; the marker_index version is for when we want a data column (e.g. category) to determine the marker shape, and the other version is if we want a separate Points() object for each category, manually setting the marker shape for each one. Both seem like valid options in some cases.

[philippjfr]

Right, usually you'd either have an NdOverlay where each layer has a different marker (and you would use a Cycle object of different markers) or a single Points object, where you potentially want each individual point to have a different marker (where the marker can be any unicode text). This also links back to #768 and perhaps providing a cleaner interface for the various X_index options we might want to add.

[jlstevens]

I understand what you mean now and yes, I would want to think about issue #768 to figure out a uniform way to handle all the index type parameters.

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