[IPython-dev] SVG figures status report

[Zoltán Vörös]

Hi Brian,

On 06/26/2012 06:08 PM, Brian Granger wrote:
> As Min mentioned if you want full LaTeX support you would have to use 
> the notebook in a different mode. You put all the LaTeX in raw text 
> cells and give up the nice MathJaX browser rendering. You are right 
> that it would be difficult to support full LaTeX in Markdown cells 
> with MathJaX rendering. 

Yes, that is what I had in mind. Not that I think it is really 
important, but my first reading of Fernando's comment on this was that 
he sort of wanted to have a LaTeX editor... Though, I have to admit that 
almost realtime rendering of LaTeX code in the notebook is rather sexy:)

>> ... So, the bottom line is that, if this plotting tool is to emerge
>> from matplotlib, then we have to work with the matplotlib developers, and we
>> can't just piggyback on what is already there. In such a case, however, we
>> would have to have a very clear idea as to what is needed, for otherwise, it
>> will be quite hard to convince the matplotlib developers.
> I pretty much agree with this.  If we want the interactive plotting to
> be integrated with matplotlib, we will have to have someone on the mpl
> team basically leading the effort.  We would have to work closely with
> them to make sure it all works together.
According to reports from Bob McElrath and Ludwig Schwardt, there might 
be bandwidth problems, if the figures are complex, and contain much 
data. I really liked your idea of having something like a json backend, 
but then it would introduce a lot of redundancy. A png figure will 
always be something like a 100 kB (of course, you can blow that up, but 
for standard graphs in the notebook), but the json backend would be 
unpredictable in this regard. Do you think that might be a problem?

Cheers,
Zoltán