Inline Whiteboard

[pylang]

I do almost everything in the notebooks, but I wish I could make quick sketches and save them too, as I do in physical notebooks. I think jupyter notebooks would be unlike any other if they supported handwritten sketches.

I imagine something like a "canvas" cell type, that triggers a simple javascript whiteboard in place of the cell and accepts cursor inputs for sketching. For example, a cell that was able to produce the following:

Based on this SO Post, there appear to be ways to implement simple JS-like whiteboards.

Before TLDR; is this a feasible request in the next versions of the notebook/jupyterlab? Has this feature has been reviewed before? Thank you.

[rgbkrk]

That would be super neat! I've wanted this as well. On a Windows surface (pro|book), it would be nice to be able to pop open an area to start drawing in a similar fashion to how we do in OneNote.

UI wise, I'd love to be able to write directly into a new cell as a canvas area and save that as image/png. It's up to a notebook implementation to handle this as they see fit.

As for implementation, I think it would be nice if there was a generic yet specified field for mime bundles similar to display_data from outputs. Something like:

cell_type: "mimebundle",
data: {
  "image/png": ...
}

Clearly I'm spitballing here. I know I opened a related issue for being able to put text/html on the page without requiring magics (for the benefit of other kernels than IPython). Basically, some way to flip between edit and view mode for a singular mimetype.

[rgbkrk]

Related issue: #1123

[pylang]

I second @rgbkrk's idea on saving to png.

[pylang]

Re: editing canvas-like images in notebooks
https://github.com/uclmr/egal

[sivark]

I came hear to suggest the same feature, only to notice that a discussion is already underway! This feature would take jupyter-notebook further along in the direction of being a versatile "notebook".

[evertheylen]

I too would like to draw some sketches within the notebook. In my search, I've encountered literallycanvas which seems to be a perfect fit (various ways of drawing, adding text, JSON load/store, etc).

[n1000]

Not adding anything constructive to this discussion, just saying it would be awesome if this were added... 👍

[alxgom]

Just another person requesting for this. I have to teach at the uni and I think having a mix of plotting/interactivity, with latex capabilitys and the hability to do a hand written lecture would be perfect.

[Alchemication]

Brilliant idea. Came here to flag same!

[alkuzman]

+1