Plot does not appear in html output of Quarto notebook when using both PlotlyLight and PlotlyKaleido

[dpo]

Thank you for making the fastest plotting package for Julia on both sides of the Mississippi!

I use PlotlyLight in Quarto notebooks, and all is well as long as you generate html output.
The following simple notebook illustrates the issue:

---
title: PlotlyLight and Quarto
engine: julia
---

```{julia}
#| output: false
using Pkg
Pkg.activate("quarto-plotlylight")
Pkg.add("PlotlyLight")
# Pkg.add("PlotlyKaleido")

using PlotlyLight
# using PlotlyKaleido
# PlotlyKaleido.start()
```

# A plot with PlotlyLight

```{julia}
p = plot(x=1:200, y=cumsum(randn(200)), type="scatter", mode="lines")
p.layout.title.text = "Your stocks"
display(p)

Rendering the notebook above to html produces the expected result: the plot is included in the html output.

Now I also use PlotlyKaleido because I need to render the same notebook to PDF. I didn't include above the commands to save the plot and subsequently include it in the report, but the issue is that if you uncomment the lines about PlotlyKaleido above and render to html again, the plot is no longer included in the html output.

I tried several versions of PlotlyLight, and the issue occurs for all of them. It seems like there is an interaction between PlotlyLight, PlotlyKaleido and (perhaps) Quarto that causes the plot to pop up in a browser tab instead of in the html output.

I'm using Julia 1.11 on Mac M1 and Quarto 1.7.30 installed via Homebrew (if that matters).

Thank you in advance.

[joshday]

PlotlyKaleido doesn't add any show methods AFAIK (it would be piracy). I think you need to explicitly call savefig.

What should happen here is that PlotlyLight should have an extension package for PlotlyKaleido that adds a show(::IO, ::MIME"application/pdf", ::Plot) method.

[dpo]

As far as I understand, PlotlyKaleido is not useful for html output, so why does it interfere? I’m not looking for a show method for PDFs. I’m looking for a plot to show up at the right place in html.

[joshday]

PlotlyKaleido is not interfering. display calls show and there's only one show method available, the one that open a plot in browser.

The workaround is to call PlotlyKaleido.savefig and then link to the saved image.

---

I misspoke above...PlotlyKaleido makes PNGs so the the mime type should be image/png. I'm not sure if Quarto will "just work" after that or not.

[dpo]

Sorry for being thick, but I don't understand how the notebook above works as expected (with the lines about PlotlyKaleido commented out). PlotlyLight does the right thing out of the box. I don't need to use savefig.

[joshday]

I re-read your original post....sorry for parsing it too quickly before. I was thinking your issue was HTML was fine, PDF was broken.

PlotlyKaleido shouldn't affect anything unless you're explicitly using savefig. That being said, things I would check:

1. Does PlotlyKaleido.start() run successfully? If that errors maybe execution stops in that block?
2. What happens when you just have p at the end of the cell rather than calling display(p)?
3. When you add PlotlyKaleido do any dependencies change?

---

If the plot is opening up in a browser that means that either:

1. Quarto isn't trying to write it as HTML (i.e. not using the show(::IO, ::MIME"text/html", ::Plot) method) and falling back on the show(::IO, ::MIME"text/plain", ::Plot) method which opens the browser.
2. There's an error when Quarto tries to call the "text/html" show method.

[dpo]

Well, strangely, this problem went away. I honestly can't point to what solved it. Maybe a dependency or another was updated. I'll open a new issue if it re-emerges. Thank you for your time.