VS Code feature request: Inline plots that respect chunk dimension options

[andrewheiss]

In RStudio, chunks that generate plots follow the dimensions specified in the chunk options (currently only with in-chunk options, but eventually hopefully also with YAML-style chunk options too)

 

In VS Code, images do not appear inline and instead either show up in a separate panel (if {httpgd} is installed), or in a separate window:

 

This is also the case when using the visual editor mode:

 

It would be helpful for figuring out figure dimensions for documents if plots could appear using the specified chunk options. But that also might just be a limitation of VS Code and/or radian and/or {httpgd} and/or something else.

[jjallaire]

Unfortunately we are sending plots to the R extension so can't directly manipulate the figure size as we can in RStudio. If there is a way to do this that we aren't aware of we are all ears to implement it!

[grst]

I think this would be solved if there was a way to execute R via jupyter (#204).

[Pindar777]

@andrewheiss could the use of out-width: X% as command inside the r-chunk be a solution?

[andrewheiss]

@andrewheiss could the use of out-width: X% as command inside the r-chunk be a solution?

Since the plot appears in a separate window, changing the out-width doesn't change anything, and if the plot could appear inline like in RStudio,out-width would only modify the width, not the height, and wouldn't change the actual dimensions of the image, just how it is displayed.

[Pindar777]

@andrewheiss I used the mentioned option to shrink images in docx output since fig.height etc. did not work (as opposed to bookdown).

Your description of the window-output makes perfectly sense. In VSCode I just resize that window, though.

[MichelNivard]

Unfortunately we are sending plots to the R extension so can't directly manipulate the figure size as we can in RStudio. If there is a way to do this that we aren't aware of we are all ears to implement it!

Could you send the R code to usr/bin/Rscript via the terminal instead of to R? Then you could catch the output and render inline? Or does either vscode or the design philosophy of knitr prevent this?

[venpopov]

I'm bumping up this issue. I recently switched entirely to vscode for all my R and quatro coding, and the ability to render code output and plots is what I miss the most from Rstudio. Could the visual editor somehow take advantage of the the Notebook API: https://code.visualstudio.com/api/extension-guides/notebook which allows to serialize code chunk outputs, save them to disk and render them?

[andrewheiss]

Bumping this again now that Positron is a thing. Because Positron is essentially VS Code, inline images don't appear inline, and they don't take the chunk dimensions

[stefanocoretta]

Yup, I too really miss the inline output feature of RStudio (posit-dev/positron#4033 (comment)).