[sdenton4]

kwargs exists, and is rather more pythonic. Just pass the kwargs dict to a standard formatting function, et voila.

[bittumenEntity]

Sadly, this drive towards the API design that matplotlib resembles, the raison d'etre of this library is the unusual (imho, great) API

[bbminner]

Could you elaborate on what exactly does such syntax provide over kwargs? To me it looks like verbatim x=a, y=b replaced by x(a)+y(b) in the argument section.