I am almost certain there was a request some time ago to be able to have e.g. ylabels of the form <the line> label (basically, moving the legend for an axes with a single artist to the ylabel). Likely the discussions should be linked...

Edit: @timhoffm found it below, it's #16005.

Semi-related: Markers on axis (#16005), but this uses dedicated methods set_xlabel_legend().

I see the appeal of embedding markers in Text via placeholders.

Implementation-wise this needs a bit more thought:

• Can we embed that into existing Text objects cleanly? Probably not because i) API-wise we have to pass the markers, ii) implementation-wise the rendering/layout algorithm would become much more complex.
• Can we make a proxy Artist, that takes the string and markers and breaks it in howmany Text objects we need and lays them out all together? This does not quite feel how we usually operate, OTOH we have some "collection" Artists.
• Can we make a dedicated Text subclass that has the additional features? Maybe

legend has already solved all this with a hierarchy of hbox and vbox packers, similar to the TeX basic objects. i.e. https://matplotlib.org/stable/api/offsetbox_api.html#matplotlib.offsetbox.HPacker I think if you want a custom 4-column legend, its just a matter of laterally laying out 3 lines instead of just one. I would not be in favour of expanding the legend API to make that happen, but the tools are all there to write your own legend_4col.

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