Displaying inline plots with matplotlib

[icweaver]

Hi,

Thanks for creating such a wonderful package, I've been having a blast playing around with it. I was wondering how I might go about displaying plots produced by matplotlib directly in a Pluto notebook, instead of directing it to an interactive gui? I see that this happens automatically for your seaborn example, but trying a simpler example directly with matplotlib gives me the following:

• Initial set-up in fresh directory

> julia --project=@.
pkg> add PythonCall, CondaPkg, Pluto
julia> using CondaPkg
julia> CondaPkg.add("matplotlib")
julia> using Pluto
julia> Pluto.run()

• Pluto notebook in same directory

begin
    import Pkg
    Pkg.activate(Base.current_project())

    using PythonCall
end

@py begin
	import matplotlib as mpl
	import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

	mpl.use("agg")
end

p = plt.plot(rand(10))
# p = Python list: [<matplotlib.lines.Line2D object at 0x7fcd403bee90>]

plt.show()
# Python None

sys:1: UserWarning: Matplotlib is currently using agg, which is a non-GUI backend, so cannot show the figure.

• System info

Julia Version 1.7.0
Commit 3bf9d17731 (2021-11-30 12:12 UTC)
Platform Info:
  OS: Linux (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)
  CPU: 11th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-1135G7 @ 2.40GHz
  WORD_SIZE: 64
  LIBM: libopenlibm
  LLVM: libLLVM-12.0.1 (ORCJIT, tigerlake)

Trying display as described here also gives me similar issues, but maybe I am misusing them here?

display(p) # returns/displays nothing, regardless of backend

Using the default interactive backend (QtAgg on my system) works just fine, but I would really love to be able to have the plots show up directly in the notebook if possible

At any rate, happy holidays and thanks again for providing this package!

[cjdoris]

Happy holidays!

PythonCall knows how to display a matplotlib.Figure so you need to return one of those from a Pluto cell.

For example something like

plt.plot(.....)
plt.gcf()

or

fig = plt.figure()
fig.plot(.....)
fig

should work.

[icweaver]

Hi, thanks for getting back to me! So I think I am misunderstanding your suggestions here. Both examples (did you also mean to put plt.plot instead of fig.plot for the second one?) return the same error for me:

(Pluto.jl v0.17.4, PythonCall.jl v0.5.0, CondaPkg.jl v0.2.3)

Is there another way that I should be importing/using matplotlib for this example?

[cjdoris]

Ah, looks like a bug in the multimedia display. I'll fix it when I'm back at my computer in the next few days.

[icweaver]

Sounds great, thanks!

[cjdoris]

I've fixed this on the main branch now.

[icweaver]

This is amazing, thanks so much!! Being able to go between inline/gui and julia/python objects so seamlessly feels like witchcraft 🪄

[icweaver]

Do you have a feel for when the next release may be? I thought it would be great to share Pluto notebooks like this one with colleagues to use Pluto's built-in package manager to automatically download and setup Python on their system for them. Currently, the manager can only pull down released packages I think, so the plot under the "Using packages" section cannot be shown just yet. Totally understand if you are trying to add in other things first before tagging the next release though!

[cjdoris]

Sure, I've just submitted v0.5.1 for registration.