View pdf image in an iPython Notebook

The following code allows me to view a png image in an iPython notebook. Is there a way to view pdf image? I don't need to use IPython.display necessarily. I am looking for a way to print a pdf image in a file to the iPython notebook output cell.

## This is for an `png` image
from IPython.display import Image

fig = Image(filename=('./temp/my_plot.png'))
fig

Thank you.


The problem you (and others) face is that PDFs cannot be displayed directly in the browser. The only possible way to get something similar is to use an image-converter to create a PNG or JPG out of the PDF and display this one.
This could be done via imagemagick and a custom display function.

Update 1

A simple solution is to use wand (http://docs.wand-py.org) a python-imagemagick binding. I tried with Ubuntu 13.04:

wand session in ipython

In text form:

from wand.image import Image as WImage
img = WImage(filename='hat.pdf')
img

For a multi-page pdf, you can get e.g. the second page via:

img = WImage(filename='hat.pdf[1]')

Update 2

As recent browsers support to display pdfs with their embedded pdf viewer a possible alternative solution based on an iframe can be implemented as

class PDF(object):
  def __init__(self, pdf, size=(200,200)):
    self.pdf = pdf
    self.size = size

  def _repr_html_(self):
    return '<iframe src={0} width={1[0]} height={1[1]}></iframe>'.format(self.pdf, self.size)

  def _repr_latex_(self):
    return r'\includegraphics[width=1.0\textwidth]{{{0}}}'.format(self.pdf)

This class implements html and latex representations, hence the pdf will also survive a nbconversion to latex. It can be used like

PDF('hat.pdf',size=(300,250))

With Firefox 33 this results in enter image description here


To show pdf-s inside ipython/jupyter notebooks you can use IFrame

from IPython.display import IFrame
IFrame("./samples/simple3.pdf", width=600, height=300)

Here is the screenshot

pdf preview in ipython/jupyter notebook