SVG renderer does not properly render matplotlib plots

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)
• Completed the Problem Description, Steps to Reproduce and Version sections below

Problem Description

Spyder’s SVG renderer does not support SVG features that are used by matplotlib.

What steps reproduce the problem?

1. run %config InlineBackend.figure_formats = ['svg']

2. Render the following plot with matplotlib: (as rendered by Ristretto on my machine) example.svg.txt (matplotlib’s svg output, sorry github doesn’t accept direct svg uploads)

(sorry I don’t have a MRE, but it uses hatching, .e.g.

    ax.fill_between(
        summarySNS['Date'],
        summarySNS['lowBoundary'],
        summarySNS['highBoundary'],
        facecolor="none",
        edgecolor=getFillColour(color, dl=+0.2, ds=-0.1),
        hatch='//////'
    )

)

1. Observe that spyder renders it as

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

The expected output would be the SVG properly rendered, at it would be by a browser.

To be honest I’d love to see you use QWebEngine to display it - that way interactive SVG with Javascript could work as well, and it would be a gateway to displaying plot libraries that output as ipython html widgets…

Versions

• Spyder version: 4.0b4
• Python version: 3.7.3 x64
• Qt version: 5.12.2
• PyQt version: 5.12.1
• Operating System name/version: Ubuntu 19.04

Dependencies

pygments >=2.0    :  2.3.1 (OK)
qdarkstyle >=2.6.4:  2.7 (OK)
sphinx >=0.6.6    :  2.1.2 (OK)
psutil >=0.3      :  5.5.1 (OK)
pyls >=0.27.0     :  v0.28.1 (OK)
nbconvert >=4.0   :  5.4.0 (OK)
pandas >=0.13.1   :  0.25.0 (OK)
numpy >=1.7       :  1.16.2 (OK)
sympy >=0.7.3     :  None (NOK)
cython >=0.21     :  None (NOK)
qtconsole >=4.5.2 :  4.5.2 (OK)
IPython >=4.0     :  5.8.0 (OK)
matplotlib >=2.0.0:  3.0.2 (OK)
pylint >=0.25     :  2.2.2 (OK)

[ccordoba12]

We’ll try to add it in the next three to six months to Spyder 5.

[ccordoba12]

Thanks a lot for letting us know about this @jnsebgosselin! This is certainly something doable and it’d be a great improvement for Spyder 5.