ipython notebooks: second impressions

I've kept working with ipython's notebook mode; it really is very well suited to my python-as-a-scratchpad style of figuring certain things out. So I've come up with a few more comments:

• SVG plots work fine and look better, at least for modestly-sized output (thousands of points on a plot, megapixel images). They're also bigger on the screen, for some reason.
• Be careful with commands that generate a lot of output; they can make your browser grind to a halt while it tries to render the output of that debugging print statement in that inner loop. During this time you also can't save your document. It might be nice if ipython noticed giant output and collapsed it.
• It would sometimes be nice to be able to collapse blocks down to a little plus sign. For example, the first block normally needs to be the imports and maybe some ipython boilerplate (setting SVG mode, for example). It'd be nice to be able to hide it while working on the rest of the document.
• It'd be nice to be able to break up class definitions into multiple blocks (for example to be able to have rendered math explanations for each method).
• In PNG mode, the images are included using data URIs. This doesn't work on the very old web browser I have at work.
• If you start pushing the memory limits of your machine it can be very hard to interact with the browser enough to kill the kernel.

For me, the most important of these is embedding the output in a blog post. It already sort of works: SVG is embedded in the output HTML, and PNG is encoded in a data: URI, so it's almost enough to strip out all the contents of the body tag and paste them into an HTML editor. Of course proper display depends on CSS, but I've added all the CSS that seemed relevant into the "custom CSS" field of my blog. The output still has some weird spacing issues; in particular, input blocks are all the same height for some reason.

Edited to add: notebooks have improved a lot since this review. I'm going to write another soon.

Now some code:

# Blog inclusion test

This is designed to test the feasibility of inclusion of ipython notebooks into 

blog entries. First some math: $x^2$, $$\oint \frac{1}{z} dz$$

Now some code:

Blog inclusion test

This is designed to test the feasibility of inclusion of ipython notebooks into blog entries. First some math: x2$x^2$,

∮1zdz

$$\oint \frac{1}{z} dz$$
Now some code:

In [3]:

cfg.figure_format = 'svg' # 'png' to switch back

from IPython.zmq.pylab import backend_inline

cfg = backend_inline.InlineBackendConfig.instance()

cfg.figure_format = 'svg' # 'png' to switch back

import numpy as np

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

In [4]:

8+7

print "Hello!"

8+7

Out[4]:

15

Hello!

In [5]:

plt.plot(np.linspace(0,1)**2);

plt.plot(np.linspace(0,1)**2);

In [6]:

cfg.figure_format = 'svg' # 'png' to switch back

cfg.figure_format = 'svg' # 'png' to switch back

In [7]:

plt.plot(np.linspace(0,1)**2);

plt.plot(np.linspace(0,1)**2);

In [ ]:

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