Jupyter Markdown Guide

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You can write content in regular Markdown files (e.g., files ending in .md).Jupyter Book supports any Markdown syntax that is supported by Jupyter notebooks.Jupyter Notebook Markdown is an extension of a flavour of Markdown calledCommonMark Markdown.It has many elements for standard text processing, though it lacks a lot of features used forpublishing and documentation.

  1. Jupyter Markdown Guide 2019
  2. Jupyter Markdown Guide Examples
  3. Jupyter Markdown Guide Download

In addition to Jupyter Notebook Markdown, Jupyter Book also supports a special flavour of Markdown called MyST (or Markedly Structured Text). It was designed to make it easier to create publishable computational documents written with Markdown notation. To do that, you can use a Markdown cell. Markdown writing skills are essential to portray your work in the Jupyter notebook to offer the reader a sufficient explanation of both the code and the.

Furthermore, you learned that in a Jupyter Notebook file, you can double-click in any Markdown cell to see the syntax, and then run the cell again to see the Markdown formatting. Note: if you type text in a Markdown cell with no additional syntax, the text will appear as regular paragraph text. To do that, you can use a Markdown cell. Markdown writing skills are essential to portray your work in the Jupyter notebook to offer the reader a sufficient explanation of both the code and the.

Jupyter Markdown Guide 2019

Note

If you’d like a more in-depth overview and guide to CommonMark Markdown, seethe CommonMark Markdown tutorial.

This page describes some basic features of the Jupyter Notebook Markdown, and how toinclude them with your book.

Embedding media¶

Adding images¶

You can reference external media like images from your Markdown file. If you userelative paths, then they will continue to work when the Markdown files are copied over,so long as they point to a file that’s inside of the repository.

Here’s an image relative to the book content root

It was generated with this code:

See also

Images and figures for more information.

Adding movies¶

You can even embed references to movies on the web! For example, here’s a little GIF for you!

This will be included in your book when it is built.

Mathematics¶

For HTML outputs, Jupyter Book uses the excellent MathJax library,along with the default Jupyter Notebook configuration, for rendering mathematics from LaTeX-style syntax.

For example, here’s a mathematical expression rendered with MathJax:

[begin{split}P(A_1 cup A_2 cup A_3)& = P(B cup A_3) & = P(B) + P(A_3) - P(BA_3) &= P(A_1) + P(A_2) - P(A_1A_2) + P(A_3) - P(A_1A_3 cup A_2A_3) &= sum_{i=1}^3 P(A_i) - mathop{sum sum}_{1 le i < j le 3} P(A_iA_j) + P(A_1A_2A_3)end{split}]

Block-level mathematics¶

You can include block-level mathematics by wrapping your formulas in $$ characters.For example, the following block:

Results in this output:

[wow = its^{math}]

You can also include math blocks by using LaTeX-style syntax using begin{align*}.For example, the following block:

Results in:

[begin{align*}yep = its_{more}^{math}end{align*}]

Important

This requires the amsmath MyST extension to be enabled.

Extended Markdown with MyST Markdown¶

In addition to CommonMark Markdown, Jupyter Book also supports a more fully-featured version of Markdown called MyST Markdown.This is a superset of CommonMark that includes syntactic pieces that are useful for publishing computational narratives.For more information about MyST Markdown, see MyST Markdown overview.

In addition to Jupyter Notebook Markdown,Jupyter Book also supports a special flavour of Markdown called MyST (orMarkedly Structured Text).It was designed to make it easier to create publishable computational documents written with Markdown notation.It is a superset of CommonMark Markdown and draws heavy inspiration from the fantastic RMarkdown language from RStudio.

Whether you write your book’s content in Jupyter notebooks (.ipynb) or in regular Markdown files (.md),you’ll write in the same flavour of MyST Markdown. Jupyter Book will know how to parse both of them.

This page contains a few pieces of information about MyST Markdown and how it relates to Jupyter Book.You can find much more information about this flavour of Markdown atthe Myst Parser documentation.

Jupyter notebook italic

Want to use RMarkdown directly?

See Custom notebook formats and Jupytext

Directives and roles¶

Roles and directives are two of the most powerful tools in Jupyter Book.They are kind of like functions, but written in a markup language.They both serve a similar purpose, but roles are written in one line whereas directives span many lines.They both accept different kinds of inputs, and what they do with those inputs depends on the specific role or directive being used.

Directives¶

Directives customize the look, feel, and behaviour of your book.They are kind of like functions, and come in a variety of names with different behaviour.This section covers how to structure and use them.

At its simplest, you can use directives in your book like so:

This will only work if a directive with name mydirectivename already exists (which it doesn’t).There are many pre-defined directives associated with Jupyter Book.For example, to insert a note box into your content, you can use the following directive:

This results in:

Note

Here is a note

being inserted in your built book.

For more information on using directives, see the MyST documentation.

More arguments and metadata in directives¶

Many directives allow you to control their behaviour with extra pieces ofinformation. In addition to the directive name and the directive content,directives allow two other configuration points:

directive arguments - a list of words that come just after the {directivename}.

Here’s an example usage of directive arguments:

directive keywords - a collection of flags or key/value pairsthat come just underneath {directivename}.

There are two ways to write directive keywords, either as :key:val pairs, oras key:val pairs enclosed by --- lines. They both work the same way:

Here’s an example of directive keywords using the :key:val syntax:

and here’s an example of directive keywords using the enclosing --- syntax:

Tip

Remember, specifying directive keywords with :key: or --- will make no difference.We recommend using --- if you have many keywords you wish to specify, or if some valueswill span multiple lines. Use the :key:val syntax as a shorthand for just one or twokeywords.

For examples of how this is used, see the sections below.

Roles¶

Roles are very similar to directives, but they are less complex and writtenentirely in one line. You can use a role in your book withthis syntax:

Again, roles will only work if rolename is a valid role name.For example, the doc role can be used to refer to another page in your book.You can refer directly to another page by its relative path.For example, the syntax {doc}`../intro` will result in: Books with Jupyter.

Warning

It is currently a requirement for roles to be on the same line in your source file. It willnot be parsed correctly if it spans more than one line. Progress towards supporting rolesthat span multiple lines can be tracked by this issue

For more information on using roles, see the MyST documentation.

Jupyter Markdown Guide Examples

What roles and directives are available?¶

There is currently no single list of roles / directives to use as a reference, but thissection tries to give as much as information as possible. For those who are familiarwith the Sphinx ecosystem, you may use any directive / role that is available in Sphinx.This is because Jupyter Book uses Sphinx to build your book, and MyST Markdown supportsall syntax that Sphinx supports (think of it as a Markdown version of reStructuredText).

Caution

If you search the internet (and the links below) for information about roles and directives,the documentation will generally be written with reStructuredText in mind. MyST Markdownis different from reStructuredText, but all of the functionality should be the same.See the MyST Sphinx parser documentation for more information about the differences between MyST and rST.

For a list of directives that are available to you, there are three places to check:

  1. The Sphinx directives pagehas a list of directives that are available by default in Sphinx.

  2. The reStructuredText directives pagehas a list of directives in the Python “docutils” module.

  3. This documentation has several additional directives that are specific to Jupyter Book.

What if it exists in rST but not MyST?

In some unusual cases, MyST may be incompatible with a certain role or directive.In this case, you can use the special eval-rst directive, to directly parse reStructuredText:

which produces

Note

A note written in reStructuredText.

See also

The MyST-Parser documentation on how directives parse content, and its use for including rST files into a Markdown file, and using sphinx.ext.autodoc in Markdown files.

Nesting content blocks in Markdown¶

If you’d like to nest content blocks inside one another in Markdown (forexample, to put a {note} inside of a {margin}), you may do so by addingextra backticks (`) to the outer-most block. This works for literalcode blocks as well.

For example, the following syntax:

yields

Jupyter Markdown Guide Download

Thus, if you’d like to nest directives inside one another, you can take the sameapproach. For example, the following syntax:

produces:

Other MyST Markdown syntax¶

In addition to roles and directives, there are numerous other kinds of syntaxthat MyST Markdown supports.MyST supports all syntax of CommonMark Markdown (the kind of Markdown that Jupyter notebooks use), as well as an extended syntax that is used for scientific publishing.

The MyST-Parser is the tool that Jupyter Book uses to allow you to write your book content in MyST.It is also a good source of information about the MyST syntax.Here are some links you can use as a reference:

See also

For information about enabling extended MyST syntax, see MyST syntax extensions.In addition, see other examples of this extended syntax (and how to enable each) throughout this documentation.

What can I create with MyST Markdown?¶

See Special content blocks for an introduction to what you can do with MyST Markdownin Jupyter Book.In addition, the other pages in this site cover many more use-cases for how to use directives with MyST.

Tools for writing MyST Markdown¶

There is some support for MyST Markdown in tools across the community. Here we includea few prominent ones.

Jupyter interfaces¶

While MyST Markdown does not (yet) render in traditional Jupyter interfaces, mostof its syntax should “gracefully degrade”, meaning that you can still work withMyST in Jupyter, and then build your book with Jupyter Book.

Jupytext and text sync¶

For working with Jupyter notebook and Markdown files, we recommend jupytext,an open source tool for two-way conversion between .ipynb and text files.Jupytext supports the MyST Markdown format.

Note

For full compatibility with myst-parser, it is necessary to use jupytext>=1.6.0.

See also Convert a Jupytext file into a MyST notebook.

VS Code¶

If editing the Markdown files using VS Code, theVS Code MyST Markdown extensionprovides syntax highlighting and other features.