how matplotlib create and deliver plot to jupyter notebook?

Question

In jupyter notebook, we can use %matplotlib inline to guide inline the image created by python script. Can anyone give a 5 sentence explaining what is happening under the hood to make that happen? If i'd like to have some web page to host the matplotlib created plot, is that possible or not? thanks~

Answer 1

The inline backend essentially calls fig.savefig(buffer, format="png", bbox_inches="tight") where fig is the figure to show. It'll then supply the content of buffer inside a <img> tag in the jupyter's output section.