[IPython-dev] IPython notebook rocks (and some new ideas)

[Brian Granger]

> First off, I just want to tell you how much I love the IPython notebooks.
> They are absolutely fantastic.  I'm a Python missionary and this helps me to
> share work that I am doing with non-python folks. I especially like how easy
> it is to integrate LaTeX into the notebook as the edit-compile-edit-compile
> cycles with LaTeX can be quite time consuming if you use the full LaTeX
> ecosystem.  And then we take several notebooks, use nbconvert, and voila, a
> beautiful document.  Brilliant.

Awesome, thanks for the feedback, we love to hear stuff like this.

> Two sample notebooks that I have put together:
> iPeng-Robinson-Soave EOS
> Implementation of phase envelope for mixtures
>
> I have a couple of modifications that I would love to see; I'm not sure how
> feasible they are:
>
> Cross-referencing.  I have a lot of equations (think tens to hundreds) and
> several equations and tables and it is nice to be link to other equations
> within one notebook, but ideally I would like to be able to refer to
> equations/tables/figures in another notebook (that might be more difficult I
> know)

We are thinking a lot about this and completely agree with you that
these things are desirable. The difficulty we are having is that
Markdown doesn't support these things so we have to invent our own
markup syntax and implement it in python and JavaScript. We are not
sure where this is going to go, but it remains one of the "tough"
problems we are hitting our heads against.

> Hiding of the code blocks.  Generating figures sometimes requires a lot of
> hacking around, and its nice to not have the hacking be completely visible,
> but only after a click through.  Sort of how in Sphinx+MPL, there is a link
> to download the source for the figure, but the source is not automatically
> embedded.  If this is already possible, how can I enable it?

We agree. We are trying to figure out how exactly this will look,
especially on nbviewer. It is not hard to implement a simple version
of this with a custom notebook extension though.

> Block folding/formatting.  For longer documents, the spacing for the heading
> 1, heading 2, etc. blocks becomes quite significant, and it would be nice if
> we could fold blocks within a heading.  Also, it would be nice if we could
> have more condensed spacing for the headings, or at least, heading 2 spacing
> much less than heading 1 spacing.

Yep, we are planning on providing some sort of UI for
hiding/collapsing blocks of content. Just haven't gotten there yet.

For the heading spacing I have this PR open:

https://github.com/ipython/ipython/pull/4786

Cheers and thanks,

Brian

> I guess that's it for tonight's ideas.
>
> Kind Regards,
>
> Ian
>
>
>
>
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-- 
Brian E. Granger
Cal Poly State University, San Luis Obispo
bgranger at calpoly.edu and ellisonbg at gmail.com