[IPython-dev] Some sighs on using ipynb to make slides

Thomas Kluyver takowl at gmail.com
Wed Nov 12 20:29:26 EST 2014


On 12 November 2014 17:19, Yuxiang Wang <yw5aj at virginia.edu> wrote:

> 1) What I was trying to express is actually now, Python packages
> generally (more than IPython) rely a lot on non-python dependencies,
> thus making it a pain for users (especially entry-level) to configure
> the environment. For example, if I'd like to use IPython Notebook to
> make a slide, I would need to google the solutions and install pandoc,
> miktex, reveal.js, and of course git on the way. Once I figured it out
> it sounds cool to me, but this is a major factor to lower Python's
> popularity as a scientific tool... I feel that most people using R is
> because R Studio did a lot of these things for them.
>
> 2) But - as that said, it's more like "pure whining" because it takes
> non-trivial effort to change this situation to such a huge ecosystem.
> And the situation is changing - I think conda is there to solve these
> issues (configuring Cython on 64-bit windows used to be such a pain,
> but now it's much easier!). :)
>

Yep, I would say conda is definitely the best approach here. There's no
reason in principle you couldn't make a conda package for something like
pandoc (though Min tried it, and doing it properly, with the Haskell
platform as a build dependency, gets interesting). Conda itself is open
source, and there's a big repository of recipes for it (
https://github.com/conda/conda-recipes/ ), so if you want to help improve
the situation, that's where I'd start.


> 3) Detailed questions - you mentioned the "(included) JS stuff", so
> are we going to have an IPython distribution with reveal.js included?
>

I think we have considered it, but it's not currently in our plans.

Thomas
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