Hiding text but not matplotlib plots in IPython notebooks - matplotlib

Question

Sometimes I have a long notebook (essentially a lab-notebook) with lots of text, headings, plots etc. What I'd like is to be able to filter out all the text and just show the plots, so that I can quickly get an overview of what's in the notebook or find that one plot I want but I can't remember exactly where I put it. There's enough text in the notebooks that it takes a long while to scroll through it all. I'm aware that it's possible with an extension to hide input cells, which helps somewhat, but often there's a lot of text in the outputs too. The matplotlib plots are typically 'inline', so that they are just embedded pngs. Thus it should be sufficient to just hide text while preserving images.
I've looked through the extension index but haven't found anything appropriate. I'm guessing I could achieve something like this using an nbconvert template, or some javascript, but perhaps someone has a good way already.

Answer 1

Depending on the type of text output, you could hide the text_output class via your custom.js. To this end add the following lines to your custom.js:
define([
'base/js/namespace',
'base/js/events'
],
function(IPython, events) {
events.on("app_initialized.NotebookApp",
function () {
$("#view_menu").append("<li id=\"toggle_toolbar\" title=\"Show/Hide text output\">Toggle Text Output</li>");
}
);
}
);
text_show=true;
function text_toggle() {
if (text_show){
$('div.output_text').hide();
} else {
$('div.output_text').show();
}
text_show = !text_show
}
This adds a menu entry in the view menu to toggle the visibility of the output_text class.
Of course if you have some text in markdown cells, these are not hidden. If required it should be straight forward to adapt the above code to hide the input cells (class input, the markdown cells (class text_cell), etc.