Download as PDF or Tex does not work with images created inline using %matplotlib notebook

[the-moog]

Bug report

(Originaly raised as jupyter/notebook#3295 Though there is some lack of clarity about which parts of Jypyter are managed where - perhaps this itself is a bug?)

Issue:
Download as PDF or Tex does not work with images created inline using %matplotlib notebook

If you create images (graphs etc) using the %matplotlib notebook magic then images created inline are not rendered in Tex or PDF output.

Instead the images is replaced with
<IPython.core.display.Javascript object>
<IPython.core.display.HTML object>

The suggested workround of replacing %matplotlib notebook with %matplotlib inline before using 'Download as' is not convienient as it does not work in all cases.
For example (given below) the figure.set_size_inches methods produces different results.

Also, any dynamic runtime changes to the plots (zoom, pan, etc) are not possible when using inline.

Example code to reproduce the issue

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np

#%matplotlib inline
%matplotlib notebook

fig = plt.figure()
fig.set_size_inches(9.5,6, forward=True)
plt.plot(np.arange(0,10,0.1))
plt.plot(np.arange(10,0,-0.1))

File -> Download As -> PDF (Via LaTeX)

This issue is also discussed here:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/35305607/jupyter-notebook-matplotlib-figures-missing-in-exported-pdf

Actual outcome
A PDF document containing code but no pictures

Expected outcome
A PDF document containing code and pictures

Matplotlib version

• Operating system: Windows 7
• Matplotlib version: 5.2.2
• Matplotlib backend (print(matplotlib.get_backend())): nbAgg
• Python version: 2.7.14
• Jupyter version (if applicable): 4.4.0
• Other libraries: n/a

Python was installed as msi from Python website
Everything else installed through pip

[tacaswell]

attn @mpacer what is the canonical location for nbagg + saving notebooks not play well together?

If you do plt.close('all') before saving does that help?

[efiring]

I tested with plt.close('all'), and it does not change the result.

[mpacer]

I think the issue is that there is no canonical location since the issue could arise in either library.

My intuition is that here for some reason it’s seeing a repr_latex that isn’t doing what we would expect and is dumping the text repr of the object. I think in this case it may be a matplotlib bug. I think the right way to handle this would be to include a repr_png repr_jpeg or repr_latex with a link to the base64 encoded static image. Since the nbagg keeps a channel open to handle updates, you might want to assign these values when the channel is closed.

The issue is that when exporting to LaTeX we can’t really deal with either html or JavaScript and converting to PDF happens via LaTeX.

[ghayth82]

I am facing the same issue, any solution?

[tacaswell]

@ghayth82 not directly, but the right place to follow the follow-on to this issue is matplotlib/ipympl#16

[jklymak]

I don’t think those are the same. That issue refers to the new widgets backend. This issue is using nbagg.

[tacaswell]

But in both cases the underlying cause is the widget protocol not being quite rich enough or not specified enough for our needs (or we are just using it wrong).

Long term we want to deprecate notebook in favor of ipympl so if we are going to fix it one place we should fix it over there.

[github-actions]

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