[IPython-dev] notebook plots via javascript

[Jason Grout]

On 6/7/12 7:33 PM, Fernando Perez wrote:
> Unfortunately it's much more complicated than that.  I experimented a
> LOT when I first wrote the inline backend, hoping to make SVG the
> default. And unfortunately, while most simple plots do indeed look
> much nicer as SVG, in production work I kept running into corner cases
> where the SVG generated by MPL was just not quite right (missing
> elements, clipping lines wrong, poor transparency handling, etc.).  Of
> course, if I was a good citizen I'd have taken the time to record
> those as test cases so we could fix them in MPL, but I just didn't
> have the bandwidth to to both ipython and mpl work (this is when we
> were just building the kernel system and the qtconsole, so our task
> list was monstrous).

We also experimented with making SVG default for the Sage cell server, 
and our experience was that complicated plots were a *lot* slower (at 
least in last year's browsers).  Often with a contour plot or something 
like that, we could see the SVG drawing the plot layer by layer 
(quickly, but still...).  Also, the time it took to get the plot finally 
on screen varied pretty widely.  In the end, we went back to png as 
default because it had approximately the same amount of time to show a 
plot no matter how complicated it was.

Jason