Creating plot markers with centered text

Question

I want to create a series of plot markers which are circles, squares etc. with 2-3 letter codes centered within the marker. My current attempt looks like this:

{
t4dot =  Graphics[{Green, Disk[{0, 0}, ImageScaled[0.07]], 
          Style[Text["T4"], Yellow, Bold, 18]}],
gk1dot = Graphics[{Red, Rectangle[{0, 0}], 
          Style[Text["Gk1", {0.5, 0.5}], Yellow, Bold, 14]}]
}

which makes:

The "T4" marker is about right (although the centering is an issue). Obviously, I haven't been able to get rectangle[] to scale properly. When I tried to use these graphics as plot markers the circle and rectangle were huge and swamped the graph whilst the text stayed the same size.

I am aiming to make markers for which the graphics primitive and the text are nicely centered and scale as a group. I want to be able to call the resulting graphics with something like:

ListPlot[{{5, 7}, {4, 6}}, PlotMarkers -> {{t4dot, 16}, {gk1dot, 18}},
  PlotRange -> {{3, 6}, {3, 8}}, ImagePadding -> 35]

Any ideas about how to achieve this?

Also, I have looked here and here and I noticed that Mathematica often offsets the text towards the top-left corner of the graphic. Is there a way to overcome this?

Answer 1

You have to center the Rectangle at {.5, .5}, and you also have to have two datasets. Simply feeding {{5, 7}, {4, 6}} is interpreted by ListPlot as a single dataset. For clarity, I've added some extra points.

t4dot = Graphics[{Green, Disk[{0, 0}, ([email protected])], 
     Style[Text["T4", Offset@{2, -1}], Yellow, Bold, 18]}];
gk1dot = Graphics[{Red, Rectangle[ImageScaled[{.5,.5}-.07], ImageScaled[{.5,.5}+.07]], 
     Style[Text["Gk1", Offset@{2, -1}], Yellow, Bold, 14]}];

ListPlot[{{{4, 6}, {5, 7}}, {{4, 3}, {5, 2}}}, 
 PlotMarkers -> {{t4dot, 1}, {gk1dot, 1}}, 
 PlotRange -> {{3, 6}, {1, 8}}, ImagePadding -> 35]