Cells cannot output in PDF format

[knuesel]

Would it be possible to support PDF output from cells?

For example executing the following cell:

%plot -f pdf

plot(magic(2))

gives the error Cannot embed the 'pdf' image format.

Having cells with PDF output doesn't sound useful for a notebook but it's actually super useful when using a Jupyter kernel as execution engine to build PDF documents (this is better explained here: JuliaLang/IJulia.jl#1035 (comment) ).

For example in Python with Matplotlib the following works:

%config InlineBackend.figure_formats = ['pdf']

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

plt.plot([1, 2, 3, 4])
plt.show()

(In the notebook GUI it shows a link to view the PDF.)

[knuesel]

I think I have a working solution for this and will submit a PR by the end of the week if that's fine with you.

[blink1073]

Sounds good, thanks!