Save as png

[t-bltg]

It would be awesome (but - I guess - not easy to implement) to be able to save Renderables as png images.

For UnicodePlots, it was added in JuliaPlots/UnicodePlots.jl#239.

And for Plots.jl we save each Plot as png, and insert it into a bigger image for simple non-nested grid layouts: https://github.com/JuliaPlots/Plots.jl/blob/ec77b9728bd09bfe8e0a511d32268373d6a1fc83/src/backends/unicodeplots.jl#L257

[FedeClaudi]

It would be great.
As you say in the PR linked it would also make documentation easier.

It should be possible. rich in python even exports to SVG and HTML.
How/where is this done in UnicodePlots? Would it be hard to adapt? Is it worth making a separate tool taking terminal output and converting it to image?

[t-bltg]

For UnicodePlots, I use FreeTypeAbstraction to render each plot row into a Matrix of RGBA colors (https://github.com/JuliaPlots/UnicodePlots.jl/blob/df510da8407c52c91cd0ddd2e83f4498f7e34839/src/plot.jl#L1015). Each character is thus rendered using freetype and drawn into this matrix.

It's satisfactory for now, and this is how I generate the documentation images such as https://raw.githubusercontent.com/JuliaPlots/UnicodePlots.jl/unicodeplots-docs/2.10/surfaceplot1.png in README.md (expect for the front banner for which I used Term and thus had to take a screenshot - hence this discussion). One can increase the size of the final image (resolution) using the pixelsize argument which controls the size of each terminal character.

In order to do that with Term we'd have to estimate the final image size, create it, split the renderable lines into chars and colors for the foreground & background, render each row into this image, and save it using FileIO.

I hack _show in order to split the chars and colors, so I guess this is too UnicodePlots specific to be split out into a package for usage in Term, however FreeTypeAbstraction is a small, low deps and contained dependency that can be added to Term.

[FedeClaudi]

Got it. It sounds interesting, but to be honest my bandwidth is a bit limited at the moment (finishing the PhD and what not).
I'll be on holiday from the end of the week and will be back with the batteries a bit recharged. Ping me in a couple week if I haven't got back to you on this, just in case I forgot.

[t-bltg]

finishing the PhD

Been there too, priorities ;)

Yes, this is my 2 cents on this so anyone interested can help, I'll see if I have time to propose something but I'm afraid this is too time consuming for me to implement.

[FedeClaudi]

yeah that's fair. Let's table for it now, I'll come back to it when I have more time