Re: [Matplotlib-users] Looking for feedback on figures using matplotlib and jupyter notebook

[Andreas M. <t3...@gm...>]

Thanks for your input Fernando.
I thought about cross-posting to Jupyter, but I'm glad you also saw it 
here :)
That would help, but not solve all problems.
I guess the Figure could hold a tag for referencing, too. It would be 
nice to get a tag and caption from matplotlib.
Maybe Benjamin's reply would help with that. But it sounds like the 
figure has a single string attached (which is more the tag).
I guess I can do
IPython.display.Figure(matplotlib_figure, caption="stuff", tag="tag")
That would be acceptable, I think.
But how do I reference that in a markup cell? [maybe I should move that 
question to the jupyter list, though]

On 01/28/2016 10:17 PM, Fernando Perez wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 28, 2016 at 3:23 PM, Andreas Mueller <t3...@gm... 
> <mailto:t3...@gm...>> wrote:
>
>     Hi all.
>
>     This is about a joint jupyter-notebook / matplotlib problem I've been
>     thinking about.
>     So I'm writing a book using jupyter-notebook, and all my figures are
>     generated using matplotlib.
>
>     In books, there is usually a figure caption with a running number and
>     some description.
>      From what I read, the best way to add captions is just using
>     plt.text.
>     However, the caption should probably be in the markup,
>     not in a rendered PNG. I'm not sure if changing the backend might
>     help,
>     but that probably doesn't make the notebook happy?
>
>     The other problem is that I want to have running numbers that I can
>     refer to by a tag (as you would in latex).
>     That is more of a notebook problem, though.
>
>     Any feedback would be very welcome
>
>
> I've been wanting to do something about this problem for a while, but 
> haven't had the cycles to work on it... Here's my current idea, 
> perhaps I can goad you into implementing it :)
>
> I think that IPython.display should provide a Figure object, capable 
> of wrapping any input image (with nice code to automatically swallow a 
> matplotlib figure without asking the user to convert it to an image 
> first), and taking an optional caption.
>
> Figure() would then produce as output the displayed image but with a 
> bit of nice CSS to center it on the page, along with the caption.
>
> The trick is to send the entire data bundle correctly structured so 
> that, at the other end, nbconvert could recognize these figures as 
> such, and not only produce nice HTML, but more importantly, push them 
> into the LaTeX output with the correct call to \figure, including 
> \caption as well as size and placement specifiers.
>
> The signature of Figure() might be something like
>
> def Figure(fig, caption=None, width=None, height=None,
>            latex_placement=None):
>
>
> I would try implementing this first as a standalone tool, and once 
> it's been tested enough in real-world usage with both HTML and LaTeX 
> output from nbconvert, it could be merged in.  I suspect it's going to 
> take a few iterations to get it right.
>
> But it's not particularly hard, and someone working on a book would be 
> the perfect candidate to have enough test cases to be able to iterate 
> until happy ;)
>
> If you think you want to take a stab at this, don't hesitate to ping 
> us on the jupyter list. We can help with some of the more obscure 
> parts of getting this to work on nbconvert (and there may be things 
> I've overlooked in the sketch above).
>
> Cheers,
>
> f
>
> -- 
> Fernando Perez (@fperez_org; http://fperez.org)
> fperez.net-at-gmail: mailing lists only (I ignore this when swamped!)
> fernando.perez-at-berkeley: contact me here for any direct mail