I'm not sure what you mean by switching to pylab. The functions should all return some object, but the handling of plotting in the ipython_directive was a bit tricky and handling the decorators was also a bit tricky in both the conversion to rst and the ipython_directive. I'm not sure the suppress decorator worked as expected with plotting at the time of writing these examples, but I know the semi-colon works. I have zero interest in working on ipython_directive anymore. It has been a big time sink for me. Really looking forward to being able to use nbconvert on the notebooks or some similar solution.