Cannot set annotation font style without Plots dependency

[anowacki]

This is a long-standing issue (e.g., see here), but one I still bump up against, though I can't find a specific issue here or in Plots for it.

I would like to be able to define the format (family, size, colour, etc.) of series annotations in recipes (with series_annotations), but I do not want to depend on Plots, and this is currently impossible. There is currently no way to set these properties without using Plots.text and thereby Plots.font. The fix for JuliaPlots/Plots.jl#555 (JuliaPlots/Plots.jl@f2e2ffa) now allows one to use recipes to set font attributes for labels, but not annotations on plots themselves. The workaround here does not work in all cases—for instance when the calling module has loaded Plots, but not in to Main—and is pretty brittle in any case.

Though I don't much understand RecipesBase or Plots internals, for me as a user it would make sense to set attributes similar those introduced by JuliaPlots/Plots.jl@f2e2ffa, and in recipes use (for example) :annotfontfamily, :annotfontsize and so on to set annotation font parameters.

[mkborregaard]

This commit: JuliaPlots/Plots.jl@7acb5a4 was intended to fix this, allowing passing a tuple instead to annotations. I know for a fact that it used to work, but something might have changed.

[mkborregaard]

So this works

struct MyType end
@recipe function f(x::MyType)
       annotations := (2, 4, ( "test", :right, 20))
       1:10, 1:10
end
plot(MyType())

[BeastyBlacksmith]

Might be relevant: JuliaPlots/Plots.jl#3463

[anowacki]

Thanks very much! I hadn't realised that passing tuples (edit: of arguments to Plots.text) was possible, and this solves my issue.

When time allows I'll submit a PR to add this to the docs (specifically the attributes list here and here for each backend). I can't find this mentioned anywhere and so I think that's why I hadn't realised it could be done.

Edit: I now see that this is in NEWS.md for version 0.22.2.