Jupyter 7: Converting notebooks

Notebooks can be converted to various output formats such as HTML, PDF, LaTeX etc. directly from the File -> Download as menu.

Conversion can also be performed on the command line using the jupyter nbconvert command. nbconvert is installed together with the jupyter Conda package and is executed on the command line by running jupyter nbconvert.

The syntax for converting a Jupyter notebook is:

jupyter nbconvert --to <FORMAT> notebook.ipynb

Here <FORMAT> can be any of asciidoc, custom, html, latex, markdown, notebook, pdf, python, rst, script, slides. Converting to some output formats (e.g. PDF) may require you to install separate software such as Pandoc Links to an external site. or a TeX environment.

Try converting the Untitled.ipynb notebook that you have been working on so far to HTML using jupyter nbconvert.

Tip
To export notebooks in the form they appear with Jupyter Extensions activated you can make use of the nbextensions template that is installed with the jupyter_contrib_nbextensions package. Adding --template=nbextensions to the jupyter nbconvert call should do the trick, but note that not all extensions are guaranteed to display right after exporting.

nbconvert can also be used to run a Jupyter notebook from the command line by running:

jupyter nbconvert --execute --to <FORMAT> notebook.ipynb

nbconvert executes the cells in a notebook, captures the output and saves the results in a new file. Try running it on the Untitled.ipynb notebook.

You can also specify a different output file with --output <filename>.

So in order to execute your Untitled.ipynb notebook and save it to a file named report.html you could run:

jupyter nbconvert --to html --output report.html --execute Untitled.ipynb

Quick recap
In this section we’ve learned:

  • How to convert Jupyter notebooks to various other formats
  • How to use nbconvert to convert notebooks on the command line