Hi Pauli, thanks for your answer!
The plots do appear in the final documentation, cf. http://docs.scipy.org/doc/numpy/reference/generated/numpy.random.gamma.html
True! I hadn't noticed as I usually use only Ipython's help, but the html pages look really nice with the plots.
It's not really feasible to have them appear in the doc editor -- there's no reliable & easy way to sandbox Python code, and I'm not comfortable with having a way to run potentially untrusted code on the servers.
Sure, I wasn't talking about having them appear in the doc editor. We can afford doing some copy & paste while using the doc editor, I think...
One thing that I'm not very happy with the Sphinx output is that copy & paste of the examples is quite difficult, since you get the >>> and ... prompts. This could be avoided with suitable HTML magick.
Maybe the wonderful %doctest_mode magic command of Ipython should be advertised somewhere... I use it all the time since I've discovered the feature, it's awfully convenient :D.
I think such a demo function could be easy to implement: just pick up the doctest lines and run them. I think a IPython extension could easily be written for this: just check what's in the ipy_*.py files under IPython/Extensions and adapt one of them.
There's a ready-made implementation of the doctest pickup in plot_directive.py under numpy/doc/sphinxext.
That's exactly the kind of hints I was looking for, many thanks! I'll have a look at the files you mention to see how it could be done. Cheers, Emmanuelle