Layout Templates and matplotlib figures

see #117 (issue) and #174 (PR) for some discussion on the topic.

@martinRenou I have been playing with using Layout Templates to stack figures in fun ways. Unfortunately, since matplotlib is currently responsible for the figure size, I end up with situations such as the following, where the figures are all cut off a bit. This is particularly noticable in jupyter notebook since the screen width is reduced.

In the following example, I stack a 4x4 of buttons and then a 4x4 of figures. The buttons stretch nicely, but the figures do not.

%matplotlib widget
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from ipywidgets import TwoByTwoLayout
from ipywidgets.widgets import Button, Layout

# Buttons
def button(name):
    return Button(description = name, layout=Layout(height='auto', width='auto'))

a,b,c,d =  button("1"), button("2"), button("3"), button("4"),
layout_2x2 = TwoByTwoLayout(top_left=a, 
                            top_right=b,
                            bottom_left=c,
                            bottom_right=d)
display(layout_2x2)

# Figures
figs = []
plt.ioff()
for i in range(4):
    fig, ax = plt.subplots()
    ax.imshow([[1,2], [3,4]])
    figs.append(fig.canvas)

a,b,c,d = figs

layout_2x2 = TwoByTwoLayout(top_left=a, 
                            top_right=b,
                            bottom_left=c,
                            bottom_right=d)
display(layout_2x2)

In jupyter lab the problem is less so, but still unfortunate that figures basically ignore the flexbox layout the widgets are designed with. I would set the size with matplotlib, but since I don’t know the size of the viewport the user is using, it’s likely that the size I choose will be too small or too large depending on the user.

I don’t have a concrete solution at hand, but I’m wondering if we can come up with some logic that preserves aspect ratio but otherwise fills a widget to its fullest extent?

[martinRenou]

Hey Neil 😃

That’s a good question. I guess we could benefit from ipympl supporting SVG outputs, but I suppose such a feature should be an opt-in (as SVG can become huge with many points on a scatter plot, while PNG stays the same size).

[thomasaarholt]

That could be a solution. We could add some kind of flag to the wigdet, something like stretched or responsive. And when this flag is set to True, instead of requesting the renderer a resize of the available space, we would stretch/shrink the image to the available space respecting the ratio. We would lose quality when stretched, but I guess we don’t have a better solution now.

I would really like this sort of flag. I was trying to add matplotlib widgets to jupyterlab-sidecar just now, and there it would be really awesome to take advantage of the flexbox style resizing.