Displaying a previously created Matplotlib figure in a widget

I’m trying to find a way to take a figure previously created, and show it inside a widget, without losing interactivity. Here’s a short version of my approach (which may not be the right one):

fig = plt.figure() # previously created figure
out = widgets.Output()
with out:
    display(fig)
# other things happening
display(widgets.HBox([fig.canvas, some_other_fig]))

If I first create a figure in the notebook outside of an Output widget, and then wish to include it later inside something like an HBox next to a second figure, I seem to lose interactivity with the figure (including the nice ipympl zoom interface).

Here is a nbviewer view of a MWE notebook I created, download it top right on the window. It’s best if one downloads it and runs it since the first figure appears buggy in the nbviewer.

Additionally, and I might create a new issue for this - if I call fig1 at the end of the notebook, I get an unexpected error. Here I’d expect the regular figure to be shown. The error is AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute '_send_event'.

[ianhi]

@alexrockhill i think there was a typo in the first post’s example. It should be fig.canvas in the HBox (i’ve just edited the first post). The canvas inherits from widget while figure does not

[thomasaarholt]

The following is my own solution. I turn off matplotlib interactive mode, which prevents the figure from being shown immediately after calling fig = plt.figure(). Then I place the fig.canvas inside whatever widget I want to use (Like an HBox). Here is an example with two figures:

%matplotlib widget
from IPython.display import display # this is automatically imported in the notebook anyway
from ipywidgets.widgets import HBox
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from scipy.misc import face

plt.ioff() # turn off interactive mode so figure doesn't show
fig1, ax1 = plt.subplots()
fig2, ax2 = plt.subplots()
plt.ion() # figure still doesn't show

ax1.imshow(face())
ax2.imshow(face(True))

display(HBox([fig1.canvas, fig2.canvas]))