Latex not working in jupyter notebook v7.

[pfebrer]

I recently upgraded to jupyter notebook v7 and I noticed that some plotly plots that previously rendered flawlessly now fail to render. I get the following output:

After some exploration I found out that it comes from an error using MathJax in jupyterlab-plotly. It tries to access MathJax.config.startup.output, but MathJax.config.startup is undefined.

It is very easy to reproduce this error:

• Create a new python environment (I tried with python 3.8).
• pip install jupyter plotly
• Open a jupyter notebook with jupyter notebook.
• Run a cell with the following code:

from plotly.graph_objects import Figure

Figure().update_layout(title="$Title$")

[pfebrer]

Ok, I installed the jupyterlab-plotly extension with jupyter labextension install plotlywidget and it works, so I guess this will be fixed in the next python package release (?)

[pfebrer]

No, sorry it also doesn't work, the previous code snippet just literally shows "$Title$" as a title, but prepending the string with 'r' makes the issue show again:

from plotly.graph_objects import Figure

Figure().update_layout(title=r"$Title$")

[zhimin-z]

Hi, I faced the same issue, any update?

[pfebrer]

No, I still need some solution for this 😅

[newville]

@zhimin-z @pfebrer I've been seeing this issue for a while too. Is there any understanding of the cause and what might be done to fix it?

[zhimin-z]

Yeah, still there... @newville

[newville]

@zhimin-z Yes, the problem still exists. Is there any understanding of the cause of the problem? Has anyone investigated what is going on in the code? I'm afraid this is a bit outside of my area of expertise.

[zhimin-z]

I have no idea...anyone who is in charge of latex functionality in this repo?

[pfebrer]

I'm tagging @alexcjohnson since he seems to be the last to have committed something to jupyterlab-plotly other than version changes :)

It looks like this is an easy fix that just needs an update to use the latest MathJax version, or somehow forcing jupyterlab to use an oldest one, I don't know if that's possible.

[newville]

@pfebrer @alexcjohnson Thanks for looking into this. Is there anything the rest of us can do to help further troubleshoot or fix this issue? I'll admit that I do not have a deep understanding of how plotply.py and plotly.js interact or which version of mathjax
is actually being used.

[pfebrer]

I don't know, everything I know is that jupyterlab uses MathJax 3.2 and plotly's docs use 2.7, but in principle version 3 should work as well according to plotly/plotly.js#6073

I don't even know how to modify jupyterlab-plotly and use a modified version of the extension. I have tried to pip install -e . the plotly repo to play a little bit with it but then jupyter doesn't render anything.

[newville]

@pfebrer Thanks, sorry to be dense, but what precisely would one have to do to make it work? Could that be folded into the plotly-py code?

The issue is kind of 3 months old, and it seems that there has been no explanation or acknowledgment of this issue.
But, I don't really know what that means. Maybe the solution is obvious to someone?