ipython/ipython — Issue #944: Decide the default image format for inline figures: SVG or PNG?
Author: fperez
Created: 2011-10-29 21:37:27+00:00
State: open
Labels: htmlnotebook, prio-critical, qtconsole

Pros of PNG:

- rendering is all done by matplotlib, so no issues with client-side rendering (the Qt SVG renderer doesn't support path clipping, for example, so it shows lines outside of the figure axes in zoomed figures).

Cons of PNG:
- xhtml save with images only works with svg
- it's a bitmap, not vector format, so image resolution is limited to that of the original render.

My suggestion would be for to make SVG the default from now on, but for the qt console to manually set kernels *it* starts to use png to avoid the clipping bug. If users do want SVG in the qt console, they can configure it themselves (which means that the qt console would need to set it to PNG only if the user hasn't set it)