Help with filled stacked area plots with legends?

I've been working to get stacked area plots working. The basic plotting was
pretty easy, but getting good readable legends for the colors has been a
nightmare. Perhaps if I share what I've done, someone will have some
suggestions. My code is attached.

The only way I've come up with to get a readable legend is to cheat and use a
table with a cell per series. If I just do this in the naive way, the table
ends up on top of the x axis label text. So I put it into a subplot. Then I
seem to have trouble controlling the the size of the table and cell font
size. If I render with gtk and resize the window, why doesn't the text resize
to take advantage of the new cell sizes?

Also, is there a better way to come up with a color set for the filled areas.
Ideally, I'd get a set of N distinct light (because you want to read black
foregroudn text) colors that would be fairly easy to identify.

It seems like I'm fighting the wrong battle. Thanks in advance for
suggestions.

stacked_filled_plot.py (1.94 KB)