small scatter plot markers in matplotlib are always black

Question

I\'m trying to use matplotlib to make a scatter plot with very small gray points. Because of the point density, the points need to be small. The problem is that the scatter()

Answer 1

In response to zwol's question in comment - my reputation is not high enough to leave comments, so this will have to do: In the event that your colors come from a colormap (i.e., are from a "sequence of values to be mapped") you can use color = as demonstrated in the following:

from matplotlib import pyplot

x = [1,5,8,9,5]
y = [4,2,4,7,9]
numSides = [2,3,1,1,5]

cmap = pyplot.cm.get_cmap("copper_r")

min, max = min(numSides), max(numSides)
for i in range(len(x)):
    if numSides[i] >= 2:
        cax = pyplot.scatter(x[i], y[i], marker = '+', s = 100, c = numSides[i], cmap = cmap)
        cax.set_clim(min, max)
    elif numSides[i] == 1:
        pyplot.scatter(x[i], y[i], marker = '.', s = 40, color = cmap(numSides[i]))

fig = pyplot.gcf()
fig.set_size_inches(8.4, 6)
fig.savefig('figure_test.png', dpi = 200)
pyplot.show()