python - View pdf image in an iPython Notebook

Question

The following code allows me to view a png image in an iPython notebook. Is there a way to view pdf image? I don't need to use IPython.display necessarily. I am looking for a way to print a pdf image in a file to the iPython notebook output cell.

## This is for an `png` image
from IPython.display import Image

fig = Image(filename=('./temp/my_plot.png'))
fig

Thank you.

Answer 1

The problem you (and others) face is that PDFs cannot be displayed directly in the browser. The only possible way to get something similar is to use an image-converter to create a PNG or JPG out of the PDF and display this one.
This could be done via imagemagick and a custom display function.

Update 1

A simple solution is to use wand (http://docs.wand-py.org) a python-imagemagick binding. I tried with Ubuntu 13.04:

In text form:

from wand.image import Image as WImage
img = WImage(filename='hat.pdf')
img

For a multi-page pdf, you can get e.g. the second page via:

img = WImage(filename='hat.pdf[1]')

Update 2

As recent browsers support to display pdfs with their embedded pdf viewer a possible alternative solution based on an iframe can be implemented as

class PDF(object):
  def __init__(self, pdf, size=(200,200)):
    self.pdf = pdf
    self.size = size

  def _repr_html_(self):
    return '<iframe src={0} width={1[0]} height={1[1]}></iframe>'.format(self.pdf, self.size)

  def _repr_latex_(self):
    return r'includegraphics[width=1.0extwidth]{{{0}}}'.format(self.pdf)

This class implements html and latex representations, hence the pdf will also survive a nbconversion to latex. It can be used like

PDF('hat.pdf',size=(300,250))

With Firefox 33 this results in