Converting an IPython notebook to other formats with nbconvert

An IPython notebook is saved in a JSON text file. This file contains the entire contents of the notebook: text, code, and outputs. The matplotlib figures are encoded as base64 strings within the notebooks, resulting in standalone, but sometimes big, notebook files.

Note

JSON is a human-readable, text-based, open standard format that can represent structured data. Although derived from JavaScript, it is language independent. Its syntax bears some resemblance with Python dictionaries. JSON can be parsed in many languages including JavaScript and Python (the json module in Python's standard library).

IPython comes with a tool called nbconvert that can convert notebooks to other formats: raw text, Markdown, HTML, LaTeX/PDF, and even slides with the reveal.js library. You will find more information about the different supported formats on the nbconvert documentation.

In this recipe, we will see how to manipulate the contents of a notebook...