• Generate and playback recordings of user interactions with matplotlib figures.
• Integrates with sphinx gallery to automatically embed interactions in the docs without needing to manually generate gifs.

See https://mpl-playback.readthedocs.io/en/latest/gallery/index.html for an example of this in action.

Directly inspired by https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/issues/19222

Command Line Usage

recording interactions To record a json file for later playback:

python -m mpl_playback.record example_file.py -figures fig --output example_playback.json

This will launch example_file.py and record any interactions with the object named fig. Then it will be saved to example_playback.json. However, the output argument is optional, if not given then the name will be example_file-playback.json

playback interactions in a gif To play back the file you must pass both the original python file and the recording json file. You can optionally pass names for the output gif(s) with the --output argument, or allow the names to be chosen automatically. 1 gif will be created for each figure that was recorded.

python -m mpl_playback.playback example_file.py example_playback.json

Q: Should you use this?

A: Depends on what you want. For one off gifs of interactions it's almost certainly easier to just record your screen to make a gif. But if you want integration with sphinx-gallery then this is currently the only option.

Example of a rendered gif: