display static images on nbconvert export

[chriddyp]

b1ec430 took out _repr_png etc methods on iplot because of performance.

an alternative might be to display the image in HTML, and remove it from the DOM once the graph is loaded. then, in nbconvert, only the image will be present in the DOM.

A WIP is here: #183

[jonmmease]

This is actually now possible in JupyterLab when using iplot with the @jupyterlab/plotly-extension. This extension adds a png representation of the plot to the mime bundle right after the plot is rendered. This png representation is saved to the notebook where it is available to nbconvert. See

https://github.com/jupyterlab/jupyter-renderers/blob/660d1529b75849e14cbe10922ff83a24fe328e61/packages/plotly-extension/src/index.ts#L77-L91

That said, with the orca integration it would also be possible to populate this image from the Python kernel, and provide configuration options for image format and quality settings.

[gvwilson]

Hi - this issue has been sitting for a while, so as part of our effort to tidy up our public repositories I'm going to close it. If it's still a concern, we'd be grateful if you could open a new issue (with a short reproducible example if appropriate) so that we can add it to our stack. Cheers - @gvwilson