Saving figure with interactive elements

[robna]

Is it possible to export interactive features?
For testing I made a plot with tool tips on hover and saved to pdf and svg (via nodejs). The figure is saved without problems, but the tool tip functionality is lost.

[jakevdp]

You can save a figure to HTML and preserve interactive elements. I'm not aware of any way to create an interactive pdf or svg.

[robna]

About pdf I also don't know if it would be feasible at all. Interactive svg however should be possible, as there are projects like @petercollingridge/code-for-blog or @sozi-projects/Sozi

And how exactly would I get interactivity in an html output? What I tried sofar is alt.Chart.show(name-of-my-chart) which opens the chart in a new browser window (outside of jupyter lab), but without interactivity.

[robna]

sorry my mistake... alt.Chart.show(name-of-my-chart) wouldn't even be using altair_saver, but the main altair library, right?
I tried now:
from altair_saver import save
save(name-of-my-chart,'name-of-my-chart.html')
This exports a html file with interactivity preserved.

Do you know by any chance if someone has tried to make export of altair charts with interactivity work in formats such as svg or pdf?

[jakevdp]

No, I don't believe pdf files or svg files support interactivity in general, so there is no way to make Altair exports to those filetypes include interactivity. The only way to export interactive Altair charts is to save them to html, for example with chart.save('filename.html') and then view it in a web browser, or to save them to JSON with chart.save('filename.json') and then load it in javascript with a tool like vega-embed.

[joelostblom]

Since Altair 5.2, the functionality of Altair Saver is now available in Altair via the vl-convert package. Most of the functionality has been available since 5.0, and the main addition in 5.2 was PDF export. See the docs on how to save charts for more details

We are going to archive this repo, so I'm closing all the open issues and PRs before doing so. Try out the new options for saving charts mentioned above and if you run into issues, please open an issue directly in the altair or vl-convert repo.