Spyder: Some issues with the Plot viewer

[goanpeca]

Problem Description

I will group a couple of issues I see currently with the Plots pane:

1. Images on retina displays look distorted. (maybe this thread helps https://gist.github.com/minrk/3301035)
2. There seems to be some horizontal scrolling with the list of images to the right:
   
3. The down arrow should allow moving between images, instead it only move the list downwards
   

[goanpeca]

@jnsebgosselin any thoughts here?

[jnsebgosselin]

Hi @goanpeca. Thanks for taking the time to report these issues.

Images on retina displays look distorted.

I will try to take a look at this. However I don't have access to a Mac. Is this doing this also with any high resolution monitors?

There seems to be some horizontal scrolling with the list of images to the right

I will take care of this, I know what needs to be done.

The down arrow should allow moving between images, instead it only move the list downwards

I don't know about this. The down/up arrows act like scrollbar buttons, so it makes sense to me that clicking on them doesn't change the current selected image.

This is similar to the caret not changing line when we use the arrows on the Editor's vertical scrollbar.

Besides, There is already the Previous Figure and Next Figure buttons and their associated shortcut to navigate/cycle through the images.

But that being said, if you still think it is a change that should be implemented, I can do it.

[jnsebgosselin]

Images on retina displays look distorted.

@goanpeca is this related to this https://github.com/spyder-ide/spyder/issues/9148?

[goanpeca]

Yes, I think they are related

[Rational-IM]

I'm also having what appears to be an issue with the quality of the images plotted on the Plots window. See on the image below that the letters on the charts are blurry. If I save the image using the "Save" icon on the navigation bar, the quality is OK. This image was a snap from a 4K monitor (Windows 10). Note that I have "Enable auto high DPI scaling" checked (which indeed helped with the size of menus, icons, etc).

[ccordoba12]

@RIM-LLC, solving the problem you mention in the Plots pane is harder than you think (although it seems simple). We need to detect the screen resolution programatically and inform the IPython console if it's high or low res for it to adjust the plots size.

We'll try to address that for version 4.1, to be released in January 2020.

[prof7bit]

I would love to see a proper standard scroll bar and get rid of the up/down buttons. If a lot of plots have been accumulated during the day it is very hard to scroll this list. The save- and delete-icons could be moved into the context menu to remove needless clutter from the UI, the delete key should delete the selected plot, arrow up/down keys should move the selection and not scroll the list, shift-up/down should select multiple plots. A normal list widget with standard mouse and keyboard behavior would do all this out of the box already and would be much less confusing!

[jnsebgosselin]

I would love to see a proper standard scroll bar and get rid of the up/down buttons. If a lot of plots have been accumulated during the day it is very hard to scroll this list. The save- and delete-icons could be moved into the context menu to remove needless clutter from the UI. Arrow up/down keys should move the selection and not scroll the list. A normal list widget with standard mouse and keyboard behavior would do a better job and would be less confusing.

After playing with the plot plugin for some time now, I agree with this. @goanpeca what do you think?

The current implementation that I made was based on Rodeo design, but I think this is not ideal.

[goanpeca]

I agree! Go for it

[jnsebgosselin]

I agree! Go for it

Master or 4.x branch?

[goanpeca]

@ccordoba12 ?

[ccordoba12]

4.x is fine for me because it solves very important usability issues.

[goanpeca]

So should we close this one @jnsebgosselin ?

[jnsebgosselin]

It is your call.

Is the problem with high retina still a thing? I guess so, but I think this problem should be tracked in its own issue.

[goanpeca]

Yeah let's close it and handle the retina thing on a separate one. We have one? otherwise could you open it :-) ?

Thanks!

[Rational-IM]

FYI - I still see blurry images (on my 4K monitor) on the current version (4.0.1). Maybe plotting high-resolution charts was already addressed. Also, the "scroll-bars" suggested above would be welcome. Even better if arrows up/down would show different plots (vs. only moving the plots up/down on the scrollbar).

[jnsebgosselin]

Yeah let's close it and handle the retina thing on a separate one. We have one? otherwise could you open it :-) ?

Yes I think the issue is tracked in Issue https://github.com/spyder-ide/spyder/issues/9148

I'm pretty sure there is nothing that can be done on the Plots plugin side about this issue though. The Plots plugin renders what he receives. I think this needs to be fix upstream in the console.

[jnsebgosselin]

FYI - I still see blurry images (on my 4K monitor) on the current version (4.0.1). Maybe plotting high-resolution charts was already addressed.

Thanks for the confirmation.

Also, the "scroll-bars" suggested above would be welcome. Even better if arrows up/down would show different plots (vs. only moving the plots up/down on the scrollbar).

This will land in next version, please see PR https://github.com/spyder-ide/spyder/pull/11576