MathJax not loaded in plotly offline

plotly.offline.plot fails (shows an unstyled plot after bailing out early due to errors) if latex is used since MathJax is not loaded in the default html. Short of getting fancy, it seems like plotly.offline.plot might need a manual option to inject MathJax from a cdn into the head tag.

[jjaraalm]

EDIT: Actually, this might not be the right place for this since the original issue did not explicitly specify Jupyter notebooks, might be more closely related to #105 or #444

This is not really an issue with plotly.py per-se, but is the result of issues upstream at plotly.js.

plotly.js does not encapsulate mathjax but instead relies on it being loaded globally and configured in a specific way. The problem is that there are multiple different output renderers for mathjax. Juypter globally loads mathjax with HTML output, but plotly.js requires SVG output. A quick and easy fix is just to change the output renderer for mathjax globally as this does not affect Juypter’s markdown rendering.

In order to address #445, mathjax should also be configured to set displayAlign = center since plotly.js explicitly sets this to left align. As far as I can tell in simple testing, the display alignment actually has no bearing on the output rendered by plotly.

Right now the code block I’m using to fix all these issues is:

# Startup plotly
init_notebook_mode(connected=True)

# The polling here is to ensure that plotly.js has already been loaded before
# setting display alignment in order to avoid a race condition.
display(HTML(
    '<script>'
        'var waitForPlotly = setInterval( function() {'
            'if( typeof(window.Plotly) !== "undefined" ){'
                'MathJax.Hub.Config({ SVG: { font: "STIX-Web" }, displayAlign: "center" });'
                'MathJax.Hub.Queue(["setRenderer", MathJax.Hub, "SVG"]);'
                'clearInterval(waitForPlotly);'
            '}}, 250 );'
    '</script>'
))

[mmlanger]

This is actually the only reason that stops me using plotly for my publication graphics. No LaTeX in offline plotly is a serious issue, is there any news on this? #444 and #445 also addresses latex problems with plotly.