Partially filled circles in matplotlib scatter plot

Question

I am currently trying to plot a partially filled circle in the matplotlib scatter plot. The marker fill styles on the official documentation offers only half-filled or empty circles. What I want is something similar to the following image:

Here I want to be able to control that, e.g., only the section 2-6 show up in a specific marker, while other markers show different ranges.

Does matplotlib support something like this? I understand that I probably need to partition the circle into 12 sections and assign them a specific color, but I don't know how to do that.

Answer 1

Here the code you need for one marker, then just iterate over x0, y0 and use white as color for the wished "vanishing" segments.

import matplotlib.pylab as plt
import numpy as np

fig = plt.figure()
ax = fig.add_subplot(1,1,1, aspect='equal')

x0 = 0.2
y0 = 0.7
rho_marker = 0.05
n_marker = 14
theta = np.zeros((12, n_marker))

for j in range(12):
    theta[j, :] = np.linspace(float(j)/6.*np.pi, float(j+1)/6.*np.pi, n_marker)
    x = x0 + np.append(0, rho_marker*np.cos(theta[j]))
    y = y0 + np.append(0, rho_marker*np.sin(theta[j]))
    ax.fill(x, y)
plt.xlim([0, 1])
plt.ylim([0, 1])
plt.show()

Here the resulting plot: