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Retina+jpeg option?

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#5 5 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
35/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Needs clarification
Activity status
Quiet
Tech stack
jupyter, jupyter-notebook

Research direction

The issue names no source file or test. Start by tracing how the inline backend handles the figure_format setting and retina sizing, then compare the JPEG behavior with the linked Matplotlib issue and Stack Overflow question; done should mean a clearly defined, tested way to produce appropriately sized JPEG notebook images.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

I often work with complex matplotlib figures with millions of points, which I've been displaying in my notebooks using the ipython magic %config InlineBackend.figure_format = 'retina'. Unfortunately, these inline images are quite large in terms of file size.

I'm looking for general suggestions on how to reduce the size of my ipynb files, which can grow into the 10s or even hundreds of MB in size and become a bit unwieldy.

One thought I had was to switch to generating jpegs, but while it looks like I can meaningfully reduce the file size by switching the backend to jpeg and increasing the dpi to 2x:

from matplotlib import rcParams
%config InlineBackend.figure_format = 'jpeg'
rcParams['figure.dpi'] = 200

From this repo, it looks like I can dial in jpeg compression values, which should help reduce file size. However, I can't figure out how to size the jpegs appropriately for a retina display (they're twice as large as they should be, and slightly blurry). Is there a way to display jpegs in jupyter notebooks at similar resolution and size to the defaults provided by 'retina' mode?

See also:
Matplotlib issue
Stackoverflow question

Dominant language
Jupyter Notebook
Stars
31
Forks
39
PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

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