It often appears that the assortment of markers offered in scatter charts is
insufficient, especially for scientific purposes, where the custom markers
taken from Wingdings or from drawn shapes
(
http://peltiertech.com/Excel/ChartsHowTo/CustomMarkers.html)
are lowbred for serious presentation. Another disadvantage of such an Excel
makeshift against some other applications is that the selected sizes of these
markers are given once for ever, and cannot be reproducibly changed by means
of menu.
There is no problem if one can use colored (hollow) markers, though various
shades of grey may even sometimes help. For black print, however,
circumvention still exists. You can use some of mentioned hollow markers as a
basic series, and then, for the same series of data, use in repetition some
of line markers (+ × * -). You become variously filled hollow shapes. Instead
of basic number of eight (reasonable) markers, you obtain 4 (square, diamond,
circle, triangle) × 6 (4+empty +full) = 24 combinations. Sorry, no
achievement is entirely for nothing. You will sometimes find out that you
must better adapt the sizes of complementing shapes by a unity to fit
perfectly. Similar conjuring can be performed with concentric (same of
different) hollow shapes with (different or same) sizes.
I wonder I have never read a recommendation on this theme, and hope it could
help not only to you.
