How to convert IPython notebooks to PDF and HTML?

Question

If you have LaTeX installed you can download as PDF directly from Jupyter notebook with File -> Download as -> PDF via LaTeX (.pdf). Otherwise follow these two steps.

1. For HTML output, you should now use Jupyter in place of IPython and select File -> Download as -> HTML (.html) or run the following command:

   jupyter nbconvert --to html notebook.ipynb  
   

   This will convert the Jupyter document file notebook.ipynb into the html output format.

   Google Colaboratory is Google's free Jupyter notebook environment that requires no setup and runs entirely in the cloud. If you are using Google Colab the commands are the same, but Google Colab only lets you download .ipynb or .py formats.

2. Convert the html file notebook.html into a pdf file called notebook.pdf. In Windows, Mac or Linux, install wkhtmltopdf. wkhtmltopdf is a command line utility to convert html to pdf using WebKit. You can download wkhtmltopdf from the linked webpage, or in many Linux distros it can be found in their repositories.

   wkhtmltopdf notebook.html notebook.pdf   
   

---

_{Original (now almost obsolete) revision: Convert the IPython notebook file to html.}

^{ipython nbconvert --to html notebook.ipynb}

Also pass the --execute flag to generate the output cells

jupyter nbconvert --execute --to html notebook.ipynb
jupyter nbconvert --execute --to pdf notebook.ipynb

The best practice is to keep the output out of the notebook for version control, see: Using IPython notebooks under version control

But then, if you don't pass --execute, the output won't be present in the HTML, see also: How to run an .ipynb Jupyter Notebook from terminal?

For an HTML fragment without header: How to export an IPython notebook to HTML for a blog post?

Tested in Jupyter 4.4.0.

From the docs:

If you want to provide others with a static HTML or PDF view of your notebook, use the Print button. This opens a static view of the document, which you can print to PDF using your operating system’s facilities, or save to a file with your web browser’s ‘Save’ option (note that typically, this will create both an html file and a directory called notebook_name_files next to it that contains all the necessary style information, so if you intend to share this, you must send the directory along with the main html file).

nbconvert is not yet fully replaced by nbconvert2, you can still use it if you wish, otherwise we would have removed the executable. It's just a warning that we do not bugfix nbconvert1 anymore.

The following should work :

./nbconvert.py --format=pdf yourfile.ipynb 

If you are on a IPython recent enough version, do not use print view, just use the the normal print dialog. Graph beeing cut in chrome is a known issue (Chrome does not respect some print css), and works much better with firefox, not all versions still.

As for nbconvert2, it still highly dev and docs need to be written.

Nbviewer use nbconvert2 so it's pretty decent with HTML.

List of current available profiles:

$ ls -l1 profile|cut -d. -f1

base_html
blogger_html
full_html
latex_base
latex_sphinx_base
latex_sphinx_howto
latex_sphinx_manual
markdown
python
reveal
rst

Give you the existing profiles. (You can create your own, cf future doc, ./nbconvert2.py --help-all should give you some option you can use in your profile.)

then

$ ./nbconvert2.py [profilename] --no-stdout --write=True <yourfile.ipynb>

And it should write your (tex) files as long as extracted figures in cwd. Yes I know this is not obvious, and it will probably change hence no doc...

The reason for that is that nbconvert2 will mainly be a python library where in pseudo code you can do :

 MyConverter = NBConverter(config=config)
 ipynb = read(ipynb_file)
 converted_files = MyConverter.convert(ipynb)
 for file in converted_files :
     write(file)

Entry point will come later, once the API is stabilized.

I'll just point out that @jdfreder (github profile) is working on tex/pdf/sphinx export and is the expert to generate PDF from ipynb file at the time of this writing.