How do we align marker and text in legends vertically in Matplotlib? - matplotlib

Question

When the marker in a legend is a dot, dot and text are not aligned vertically. To solve this I tried following:
l = ax.legend()
for text in l.texts:
text.set_va('center') # Is there some setting for this in matplotlibrc, too??
plt.show()
The vertical alignment of text in a legend seems to be baseline. But no matter whether I choose center, bottom or baseline, etc., things are off:
Zooming in, this is what Matplotlib gives us out of the box:
What I want is also what other software like Inkscape gives me, when aligning two objects vertically:
Can Matplotlib do this for me/us?

Answer 1

This appears to work:
Set it to display only a single scatterpoint per legend entry by setting scatterpoints=1 in the call to legend()
Set the vertical offset of this point to 0 by setting scatteryoffsets=[0] in the call to legend()
After creating the legend, iterate through its text labels and set their vertical alignment to center_baseline, using for t in l.get_texts(): t.set_va('center_baseline')
figure(figsize=(2,2))
scatter([0],[0],marker='s',s=20,label='Thing 1')
scatter([1],[0],marker='s',s=20,label='t')
scatter([2],[0],marker='s',s=20,label='T¹₁')
l = legend(scatterpoints=1,scatteryoffsets=[0],handletextpad=-0.5)
for t in l.get_texts(): t.set_va('center_baseline')

Answer 2

Here is what I do:
import numpy as np
import matplotlib
matplotlib.use('Agg')
matplotlib.rcParams['text.latex.preamble'] = r'\usepackage{amsmath}'
matplotlib.rc('text', usetex = True)
from matplotlib import pyplot as py
## setup figure
figure = py.figure(figsize = (7.5, 5.0))
axs = [py.subplot(1, 1, 1)]
## make plot
xs = np.linspace(0.0, np.pi, 100)
ys = np.sin(xs)
axs[0].plot(xs, ys, color = 'dodgerblue', label = r'$n = 1$')
ys = np.sin(2.0 * xs)
axs[0].plot(xs, ys, color = 'seagreen', label = r'$n = 2$')
axs[0].axhline(0.0, color = 'gray', linestyle = 'dashed')
## vertical alignment
legends = axs[0].legend(frameon = False, fontsize = 25, loc = 'lower left')
shift = np.average([_.get_window_extent(renderer = figure.canvas.get_renderer()).height for _ in legends.get_texts()])
shift /= 3.6
for _ in legends.get_texts():
_.set_va('center') ## va is alias for verticalalignment
_.set_position((0, shift))
## save figure
name = 'test.pdf'
py.tight_layout()
py.savefig(name)
py.close()
It is, however, complicated and requires manual adjustments,
I am still looking for better solutions.