<div dir="ltr">Hi,<div><br></div><div>I have been playing with the notebook and nbconvert from master, and have some feedback on some basic usability issues, which I hope will be useful.</div><div><br></div><div>Note that I am not (yet) a developer, but am rather trying to get a feel for things before possibly moving in that direction...</div>
<div><br></div><div>Please let me know if this is not the correct forum for such comments, and if I should, for example, instead open issues.</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>1. Ipython command line invocation</div>
<div>- Would it be possible to get rid of the hyphens in --pylab and --profile in the ipython invocation? I understand that this is to do with implementation, but it is neither easy to remember, nor to motivate to novices that they should type this!<br>
</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>- Is there a good (non-historical) reason to use 'nbconvert' instead of just </div><div>ipython convert TARGET FILENAME?</div><div>Or even convertnb, so that the verb and noun are in the natural order.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Or make nbconvert just a separate binary (which, I understand, it basically is anyway, at least on unices):</div><div><br></div><div>nbconvert TARGET FILENAME?</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>
- Is it possible / easy to set up bash completion to press <TAB> after 'ipython' and have the options displayed?<br>
</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>- It would great to be able to type</div><div>ipython notebook odes.ipynb</div><div>and have the relevant ipynb open directly, instead of going via the dashboard</div><div><br></div>
<div><br></div><div>2. nbconvert:</div><div>- It would be great (necessary, in my opinion) to have an 'Export as' option from within the notebook to run the relevant nbconvert. </div><div><br></div><div><br></div>
<div>- PDF converter:<br></div><div>A direct PDF converter is necessary. </div><div>This is presumably trivial by just running</div><div>pdflatex after the LaTeX converter.</div><div>(Oh, if LaTeX is installed of course... I guess this is the problem?)</div>
<div><br></div><div><br></div><div>- html converter:</div><div>I tried <br></div><div>ipython nbconvert html odes.ipynb</div><div><br></div><div>but it doesn't work!</div><div><br></div><div>I strongly suggest to replace 'full_html' with just 'html'</div>
<div>and 'simple_html' could be 'basic_html'</div><div><br></div><div>- I was expecting that the HTML output would look exactly like on nbviewer, which is also a static copy of the notebook, but it looks different<br>
</div><div>I guess this is a CSS thing -- is there a good solution to have something exactly like on nbviewer?</div><div><br></div><div>- The nbconvert step produced an empty subdirectory 'odes_files' with html export and some .txt files for LaTeX output. This seems unnecessary from the user point of view.</div>
<div><br></div><div><br></div><div>- Folding:</div><div>In my notebook, the output of several cells were folded, in particular the result of things like <br></div><div>help(odeint)</div><div>[I am planning on using this for a course, and wanted to record this step in the notebook]</div>
<div>But in the result of nbconvert, the full output of the documentation is shown.</div><div><br></div><div>This is very bad news -- how can the output folding be respected and not shown?</div><div><br></div><div><br></div>
<div>- New LaTeX commands:</div><div>I defined various LaTeX shortcuts like</div><div>\newcommand{\yy}{\mathbf{y}}</div><div>inside $$...$$ in markdown cells.</div><div>(Is this the correct / canonical way to do this?)</div>
<div><br></div><div>Markdown seems to respect these in the rest of the document, and in the HTML output, but running</div><div>pdflatex on the LaTeX output forgot about them immediately after they were defined. </div><div>
<br></div><div><br></div><div>- Suppressing code cells in LaTeX output:<br></div><div>Towards the reproducible paper goal, how can code cells be suppressed in the LaTeX output. I guess with the metadata somehow?</div><div>
<br></div><div><br></div><div>3. Notebook issues:</div><div>- Keyboard shortcuts:</div><div>I am a keyboard person: for me, all functionality which is accessible via menus should be assigned a (preferably modifiable) keyboard shortcut.</div>
<div>In particular, it seems that split cell, merge cell, and close and halt are currently missing shortcuts.</div><div><br></div><div>- Similarly, could there be toolbar icons for split and merge?</div><div><br></div><div>
- Basic find and replace in the notebook:<br></div><div>Find and replace, at least a basic one, is a must-have feature for refactoring.</div><div>This seems to already be available in CodeMirror</div><div><br></div><div>
- In-place file editing<br>
</div><div>It seems that by combining the %load and %%file magics, </div><div>one has a kludgy way of editing an arbitrary file.</div><div>Maybe this could be combined easily into an %%edit magic?</div><div><br></div><div>
- Is there a way of deleting multiple input cells simultaneously, rather than pressing Ctrl M-d several times or clicking the scissors icon several times (which admittedly is easier in this case). This would be very nice to have<br>
</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>4. Notebook styling:</div><div>- There seems to be much appetite for notebook styling, e.g. xkcdify.</div><div><br></div><div>Here is a gist I found, referenced from a blog post that Brian commented on at some point, with a very basic interface. Something like this would be great to have, with a user-contributed style database:</div>
<div><br></div><div><a href="https://gist.github.com/aflaxman/5707238">https://gist.github.com/aflaxman/5707238</a><br></div><div><br></div><div>Maybe this could just be via load_ext?</div><div><br></div><div>By the way, is there a list of the possible extensions available?</div>
<div><br></div><div>- Will Min's nbtoc extension be integrated?</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>Apologies for the long message, but these are the things that have been bugging me for the last few days :)</div>
<div><br></div><div>Thanks and best wishes,</div><div>David.</div><div><br clear="all"><div><br></div>-- <br>**************************************************************************<br>Dr. David P. Sanders<br><br>Profesor Titular A / Associate Professor<br>
Departamento de Física, Facultad de Ciencias<br>Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM)<br><br><a href="mailto:dpsanders@gmail.com" target="_blank">dpsanders@gmail.com</a><br><a href="http://sistemas.fciencias.unam.mx/%7Edsanders" target="_blank">http://sistemas.fciencias.unam.mx/~dsanders</a><br>
<br>Cubículo / office: #414 <br>Tel.: +52 55 5622 4965<br><br>
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