Make cell output in Jupyter notebook scroll horizontally?

Question

I have a long Sympy expression that I'd like to get printed with a horizontal scrollbar beneath it. Is it possible to do so in Jupyter? I'm able to toggle vertical scrolling but I want it to be horizontally scrollable instead. The problem with vertical scrolling is that the output of sympy.pretty_print() gets badly distorted in my case. The output also looks ugly and the user has to scroll through the whole output unnecessarily.

Answer 1

Something similar to the np.set_printoptions(linewidth=some_large_number) and/or np.set_printoptions(threshold=some_large_number) approach can be useful but doesn't fix the problem if Jupyter's output window is itself too narrow.

The quickest solution I ended up with is inserting this line somewhere at the top of your notebook:

from IPython.core.display import HTML
display(HTML("<style>pre { white-space: pre !important; }</style>"))

If you want to change this setting for all of your notebooks, you'll need to mess around with the custom.css config file for Jupyter as discussed here.

I wasted too much time figuring this out. Hopefully I can help some of you figure it out quicker!

Answer 2

Iterating on Eric's response slightly, here's a self-contained version that only creates horizontally-scrolling outputs when you want it to, rather than enabling it notebook-wide:

from IPython.display import display, HTML
from pprint import pformat
def boxprint(*args):
    for arg in args:
        display(HTML('<pre style="white-space: pre !important;">{}</pre>'.format(pformat(arg))))