.. currentmodule:: altair
.. _user-guide-saving:
Saving Altair Charts
--------------------
Altair chart objects have a :meth:`Chart.save` method which allows charts
to be saved in a variety of formats.
.. saving-json:
JSON format
~~~~~~~~~~~
The fundamental chart representation output by Altair is a JSON string format;
one of the core methods provided by Altair is :meth:`Chart.to_json`, which
returns a JSON string that represents the chart content.
Additionally, you can save a chart to a JSON file using :meth:`Chart.save`,
by passing a filename with a ``.json`` extension.
For example, here we save a simple scatter-plot to JSON:
.. code-block:: python
import altair as alt
from vega_datasets import data
chart = alt.Chart(data.cars.url).mark_point().encode(
x='Horsepower:Q',
y='Miles_per_Gallon:Q',
color='Origin:N'
)
chart.save('chart.json')
The contents of the resulting file will look something like this:
.. code-block:: json
{
"$schema": "https://vega.github.io/schema/vega-lite/v4.json",
"config": {
"view": {
"continuousHeight": 300,
"continuousWidth": 400
}
},
"data": {
"url": "https://vega.github.io/vega-datasets/data/cars.json"
},
"encoding": {
"color": {
"field": "Origin",
"type": "nominal"
},
"x": {
"field": "Horsepower",
"type": "quantitative"
},
"y": {
"field": "Miles_per_Gallon",
"type": "quantitative"
}
},
"mark": "point"
}
This JSON can then be inserted into any web page using the vegaEmbed_ library.
.. saving-html:
HTML format
~~~~~~~~~~~
If you wish for Altair to take care of the HTML embedding for you, you can
save a chart directly to an HTML file using
.. code-block:: python
chart.save('chart.html')
This will create a simple HTML template page that loads Vega, Vega-Lite, and
vegaEmbed, such that when opened in a browser the chart will be rendered.
For example, saving the above scatter-plot to HTML creates a file with
the following contents, which can be opened and rendered in any modern
javascript-enabled web browser:
.. code-block:: HTML
You can view the result here: `chart.html `_.
By default, ``canvas`` is used for rendering the visualization in vegaEmbed. To
change to ``svg`` rendering, use the ``embed_options`` as such:
.. code-block:: python
chart.save('chart.html', embed_options={'renderer':'svg'})
.. note::
This is not the same as ``alt.renderers.enable('svg')``, what renders the
chart as a static ``svg`` image within a Jupyter notebook.
.. _saving-png:
PNG, SVG, and PDF format
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
To save an Altair chart object as a PNG, SVG, or PDF image, you can use
.. code-block:: python
chart.save('chart.png')
chart.save('chart.svg')
chart.save('chart.pdf')
However, saving these images requires some additional extensions to run the
javascript code necessary to interpret the Vega-Lite specification and output
it in the form of an image.
Altair can do this via the altair_saver_ package, which can be installed with::
$ conda install altair_saver
or::
$ pip install altair_saver
See the altair_saver_ documentation for information about additional installation
requirements.
Figure Size/Resolution
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
When using ``chart.save()`` above, the resolution of the resulting PNG is
controlled by the resolution of your screen. The easiest way to produce a
higher-resolution PNG image is to scale the image to make it larger, and thus
to contain more pixels at a given resolution.
This can be done with the ``scale_factor`` argument, which defaults to 1.0::
chart.save('chart.png', scale_factor=2.0)
.. _altair_saver: http://github.com/altair-viz/altair_saver/
.. _vegaEmbed: https://github.com/vega/vega-embed