WGLMakie.jl in quarto doesn't show any images

[jbrea]

I tried naively to create some WGLMakie plots in a quarto document, but they don't show up in the output.
I don't know if this is an issue of quarto or WGLMakie (or if it is just me failing to use those great tools together).
I ping also Makie authors here, in case they can provide some insight @SimonDanisch, @jkrumbiegel

Here is a screenshot of the top of the output

Attached are the mwe.qmd file and the output of quarto render mwe.qmd.
mwe.zip

[SimonDanisch]

Does Quarto have an HTML output? Looks like the page is simply printed instead of calling show(io, ::MIME"text/html", page::Page)

[jbrea]

Thanks! I think this is indeed the problem.

[jbrea]

I hoped something like the following would work, but it doesn't...

#| output: asis
using JSServe, WGLMakie, Markdown
WGLMakie.activate!()
show(stdout, MIME"text/html"(), Page(exportable=true, offline=true))
show(stdout, MIME"text/html"(), scatter(1:4, color=1:4))

@quarto-devs: is there a possibility to add something like #| output: html to make this work?

[SimonDanisch]

When I look at quarto, it seems like you may want to use CairoMakie instead of WGLMakie?

[cscheid]

Does WGLMakie call back to Julia in interactive sessions or does it compile everything to JS?

If it's the former, then it cannot possibly work as it exists with quarto, since the resulting HTML needs to be able to talk to a server. If it's the latter, then it might one day work, but I don't think we currently have support for it.

[SimonDanisch]

It's both: https://docs.makie.org/v0.18.2/documentation/backends/wglmakie/index.html...
but since we don't compile any julia to JS, it's pretty restricted what can be done...

[jbrea]

Does WGLMakie call back to Julia in interactive sessions or does it compile everything to JS?

In the example above I use WGLMakie with exportable=true, offline=true, which has the effect of inlining all data & js dependencies, so that everything could be loaded in a single HTML object.

[cscheid]

@SimonDanisch Oh, I'm sorry, I should have checked that you're the Makie developer. Good to see you around here! I'd love to one day figure out a good graphics/vis solution for quarto+julia. If you have the time and willingness to offer suggestions, feedback, and Julia expertise, would you mind if I contacted you in the future about this?

[SimonDanisch]

Yeah let me know :)

[cscheid]

(@jbrea Starting a new thread about the specifics here.) I'm looking through your MWE example, thanks for sharing that. Is there a reason you're using the knitr engine? Essentially all of our julia examples go through jupyter and IJulia.

I'm also having a hard time getting your example to work even on Jupyter itself. Do you have a working example to compare against the quarto failure you're getting?

[jbrea]

Thanks for looking at this, @cscheid!

I am using knitr, because I want to use it in a multi-language document. My goal is to provide teaching material for a programming language agnostic machine learning course, i.e. students can choose if they want to see code examples and exercises in julia, python or R, using tabset-panels. Currently the course material is written purely in julia (with Pluto). So far I haven't found a simple way to use python and R code cells in Pluto, which is why I started looking into quarto.

To get my mwe running, open a julia REPL in the folder where you saved mwe.qmd (I assume you have julia 1.8.2 installed) and run

using Pkg; Pkg.activate(".")
Pkg.add(["JSServe", "WGLMakie", "Observables", "Markdown"])

and then run quarto render mwe.qmd.

The WGLMakie code in my mwe is taken from the WGLMakie docs.

[agerlach]

@jbrea Did you ever find a solution to this?

[epfl-bio322]

Not within quarto; I didn't further investigate. But I found a rather easy and flexible way to write multilang documents in Pluto (see here).