Plot pane save fails for anything other than SVG

[Cardoza2]

With the recent update the plot pane defaults to save a SVG file, and fails when you try and save anything else (the file is corrupted).

System

macOS Monterey Version 12.4

VScode

Version: 1.68.1
Commit: 30d9c6cd9483b2cc586687151bcbcd635f373630
Date: 2022-06-14T12:52:13.188Z (1 mo ago)
Electron: 17.4.7
Chromium: 98.0.4758.141
Node.js: 16.13.0
V8: 9.8.177.13-electron.0
OS: Darwin x64 21.5.0

Julia extension

v1.6.28

[pfitzseb]

I can't repro this with e.g.

julia> using Images, ImageShow

julia> struct Foo end

julia> function Base.show(io::IO, mime::MIME"image/png", img::Foo)
         show(io, MIME"image/png"(), rand(RGB, 2000,2000), maxpixels=1e9)
       end

julia> Foo()

[Cardoza2]

That was silly of me; I didn't provide a code sample. It turns out to be user error (as is the norm).

Here's what I was previously doing:

using Plots

x = 0:0.1:10
y = rand(length(x))

plt = plot(x,y)
display(plt)

Then click the save button that appears above the plot pane. It defaults to a SVG and won't save as anything else.

Here's what I needed to do:

using Plots

x = 0:0.1:10
y = rand(length(x))

plt = plot(x,y)
display("image/png", plt)

I do find it odd though that previously from the plot pane save button I could save the image as a png, or a svg without explicitly declaring the image type in the display/show command.

[pfitzseb]

No, this is an actual issue. All of the following should save with the right file extension:

using Plots
p = plot(1:10, rand(10));
display(p)
display("image/png", p)
display("image/svg+xml", p)

[Cardoza2]

Oh, okay... here is my current saving behavior:

display("image/png", p) will save as a png.
display(p) saves as a svg only, but not as a png (I think the previous behavior was that I could choose, or it was png default.).
display("image/svg_xml", p) saves as a svg.

[pfitzseb]

Ok, I can repro the issue. Fix incoming :) Actually, no, I can't. Plots just does weird things with fmt=:png.

[Cardoza2]

Oh, I didn't see that you'd edited your response. Is there a default I can change so the format remains as a png? It's annoying that all my images save as SVG. Like they look better, but preview on a Mac can't open SVG and slack doesn't display SVG... so it's a bit of a pain.

[david-macmahon]

fails when you try and save anything else (the file is corrupted).

I saved a plot to plot.png and MacOS Preview said it was corrupted, but file plot.png reported that it was an SVG file. So it's not really corrupted in that it's not a PNG file with bad data. It's just that it's a non-corrupted SVG file rather than PNG file. Renaming plot.png to plot.svg allowed Safari to open it as an SVG file.

[david-macmahon]

FWIW, I found that savefig("plot.png") still saves the plot as a proper PNG file.

[Cardoza2]

Thanks. I think I'll just need to add display("image/png", p) to my workflow, or something similar. Maybe display() changed its default behavior. I really like being able to generate a bunch of figures, then decide which ones to save.

[mattcbro]

This is really annoying behavior. Is there any way a setting in vscode can be invoked to change the default image file format? svg doesn't display in teams or slack apparently. The default used to be png, but maybe the format could be detected by the extension as savefig does.

[ramilrgk]

Is there any way to solve this problem? Still relevant

[axsk]

See also #2474 and #2070
Apparently the default once was to use .svg, then switched to .png and now back?

Does anyone know which method one could overwrite such that display("image/png", p) becomes the default at least as a hotfix?

[RGonTheNoble]

You don't want to use "display("image/png", p)" as default because that would override interactive plot settings. I think the best solution would be to overwrite "savefig" with "png".