Plots pane has problems saving images generated by Plotly

Issue Report Checklist

• Searched the issues page for similar reports
• Read the relevant sections of the Spyder Troubleshooting Guide and followed its advice
• Reproduced the issue after updating with conda update spyder (or pip, if not using Anaconda)
• Could not reproduce inside jupyter qtconsole (if console-related)
• Tried basic troubleshooting (if a bug/error)
  • Restarted Spyder
  • Reset preferences with spyder --reset
  • Reinstalled the latest version of Anaconda
  • Tried the other applicable steps from the Troubleshooting Guide
• Completed the Problem Description, Steps to Reproduce and Version sections below

Problem Description

The newly add feature: plots has problems with saving the plotted image produced by Plotly.

When using the Save Image As… button, the saved image will have the default size of 700x450 px. This cannot be changed even if the size is specified otherwise in plotly API.

If the image is saved by Plotly itself, the image will have a correct size (ex. 800x600 px).

What steps reproduce the problem?

1. plot anything in Plotly.
2. specify the image size.
3. save the image using “Save Image As…” button in Spyder.

What is the expected output? What do you see instead?

The saved image will have a default size (i.e. 700x450) which cannot be changed.

Paste Traceback/Error Below (if applicable)

PASTE TRACEBACK HERE

Versions

• Spyder version: 4.0.0
• Python version: 3.7.3
• Plotly version: 4.1.1

Dependencies

Reproducing the problem:

import plotly.graph_objects as go
import os

script_path = os.path.dirname(os.path.realpath(__file__))
animals=['giraffes', 'orangutans', 'monkeys']

fig = go.Figure([go.Bar(x=animals, y=[20, 14, 23])])

fig.update_layout(height = 600,
              width = 800,)
fig.show()
fig.write_image(script_path + '/fig.png')

[ccordoba12]

This is pretty nice @jnsebgosselin! I think we should add this to spyder-kernels, like this:

• You need to add some lines similar to these ones:

  https://github.com/spyder-ide/spyder-kernels/blob/2c5b36cdb797b8aba77bc406ca96f5e079c4aaca/spyder_kernels/console/start.py#L125-L127

  to register the renderer at startup.

• Then you need to create a method in our kernel, similar to this one

  https://github.com/spyder-ide/spyder-kernels/blob/2c5b36cdb797b8aba77bc406ca96f5e079c4aaca/spyder_kernels/console/kernel.py#L520-L531

  with the code you posted above to do the actual job (but inside a try/except to account for the possibility of not having Plotly installed).

[jnsebgosselin]

Can we do this in our side and register it when Plotly is imported? Or how does this work @jnsebgosselin?

I don’t know, I’ll take a look and report back.