We do have, just they are not very visible with the default marker background settings (look at the third row in the marker chooser)

There is a bug here on my Ubuntu 12.10 system.
The first three symbols of the third row appear like squares.

Not sure you have a bug. Choose a white or, preferably a transparent background for the marker.

Created attachment 232554 [details]
screenshot

I assume Frederic sees the same as I do  and which is shown in the attached screenshot. Note that the "squares" in the third row have some small dots in the centres of each side .

Jean, I gather that when you say 'background' you mean 'fill'. THere is something strange going on with the filling. I think this is a bug.

What is strange? It alsways worked this way, and is excel compatible as far as I remember how excel behaves.

I think that having a "fill" that colours areas outside of the stroked boundary of the crosses can be classified as strange. Nevertheless you are correct in that Excel's fill behaves the same way.

There is one significant difference in Excel though: when I create a scatterplot in Excel the marker fill is set to "automatic" which results in no fill for crosses and a solid fill for the squares, etc. So the crosses are very clearly visible.

When the marker is automatic, and with both default and guppi theme, the fill color is set to transparent. Not when editing the style though.
Create a new empty plot with four series, and look at the marker style for the fourth series.

Now is this a bug or a feature?

I guess the difference is that Excel has a fill colour that is "automatic", while Gnumeric sets the fill colour automatically when creating the graph but once it is set it is a fixed colour (that can be changed).

It probably makes sense to change the auto-fill behavior for unclosed markers (cross, x, and asterisk), so that it is always transparent whatever the theme.

Created attachment 300698 [details] [review]
Proposed patch

Can anybody test this patch?

I tested it and it works for me.
The automatic filling is transparent for empty markers and has the same colour than the outline for non-empty markers.
Two remarks:
- I still find it a bit strange to allow filling for empty markers. Not sure we should mimic this stupid XL behavior
- I can't find a way to set the fill colour to transparent. Is this possible right now?

1. It's better to be excel compatible when possible
2. Yes, using the custom color button.

Anyway, my patch is not enough. The selected fill color should be transparent in the selector too, otherwise it is not possible to use the non transparent default color (a very minor issue anyway, but it makes sense to reflect the actual color in the selector).

Hmm, looks that that patch is the best that can be done without changing the whole thing, so I'll go for it.

Review of attachment 300698 [details] [review]:

Patch applied.

This problem has been fixed in our software repository. The fix will go into the next software release. Once that release is available, you may want to check for a software upgrade provided by your Linux distribution.