Autogenerate images of parts of the viewer

[TimMonko]

References and relevant issues

Description

This is really a draft of trying to autogenerate images that we can use throughout the docs. I think this would also speed up doc generation in certain areas with reusable doc images, so that nbscreenshot would not need to be as frequent. Everything is getting saved into images/_autogenerated and could be used elsewhere.

1. Tries to autogenerate grabbing and saving many parts of the viewer using the attributes of the viewer

Needs:

1. Popups are not working right, sometimes they trigger, often its the dims slider popup. I probably need to just directly call the button, but I'm having a tough time figuring out where the buttons live.
2. I think the timing of things has me really confused. I think QTimer is necessary to wait for things to popup, but I can't figure out why these popups aren't working
3. Also sometimes the console popups and saves as a screenshot, other times its just the thin dock area prior to the console popup.

Examples of what should appear in autogenerated if CI does it the same was as locally

[TimMonko]

Adding a few links from the community meeting today:
https://simonwillison.net/2022/Oct/14/automating-screenshots/
https://simonwillison.net/2022/Mar/10/shot-scraper/
napari/napari#7678
and look into qt_bot wait

[melissawm]

Hi @TimMonko - this is the PR I mentioned on zulip: #308

That one is more focused on videos, so might not be helpful but just in case here it is. Cheers!

[Czaki]

This is not a good solution. We need to find a way to define a list of popups to iterate over it.
Maybe global list and just pass the index?

[TimMonko]

can you look strictly at autogenerate-gui? I've put the most recent popup stuff in there. It's flaky, where sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, I've tried to include closing popups there, but yes, trying to work towards creating a list. Sorry I didn't remove this file 😬

[Czaki]

in 2-3 hours

[TimMonko]

of course! no issue, I'm actually going to plug along on it for about another hour, so you should receive a better file by then

[TimMonko]

your review did at least confirm some of the direction I thought it needed to go

[Czaki]

The previous popup is not closed before your code triggers creation of the next popup, so the first popup is captured again. We either need to use proper class in place of QtPopup or use objectName() method (with earlier setting it).

[TimMonko]

@Czaki
Everything is organized in one file now, and the script is not flaky anymore.
QTimer actually seems to create more problems than fewer problems for popups, compared to menus. Perhaps I was implementing incorrectly --though I was using same logic as menus, it would be delayed asynchronously. Strangely, lowering Qtimer for capturing menus to 50ms resulting in incomplete generation of popups. The async part of this is so confusing.

1. Creates images of many widgets
2. Creates images of many menu items
3. Creates images of popups with prep triggers.

We can add / change more and modify callbacks in various ways, but as @willingc we can start with a merged script and go from there.

I hope it's not flaky on anyone else's machine, or CI.

[willingc]

Let's merge this as is. I would like to do a pass over the script and change some of the print statements to logging (it will benefit us when running in CI).

[TimMonko]

Sounds good, the prints were really just for debugging lol. I take them out as things start to work. Definitely anything with prints from me is a 'draft'. Can still merge though if you like

We should be able to see if CI autogenerates correctly

[willingc]

I would like us to merge and iterate on it.

[melissawm]

Can we add a comment in the script to indicate which images it is generating?

[TimMonko]

@melissawm I added much more commenting to try to clarify what is being saved and I hope the code organization is sufficient to be self explanatory. However, if what you mean is to specifically say which images for the docs this is generating, I'm not sure that's a good idea (will be hard to maintain and keep up to date). Please let me know if I haven't accomplished the goal.

I've also added various interactions with the canvas to change the display of various widgets -- we can always be very specific if we have things in mind to demonstrate. At this point, I'm very happy with this implementation, and want us to merge this to check it works on CI, and then we can look to specifically define images of interest that can be used in the docs.

I also added a preliminary, rough implementation of capturing regions of the viewer as defined by the widgets. In the long run, this will be more maintainable than defining the region with our own coordinates (since inevitably these coordinates could move around). Currently, it just crops to the bounds of the defined widgets, for example:

Viewer buttons + Console:

Layer list and layer controls