The New “Jupyter Book”

August 13, the “Jupyter Book” project announced the new Jupyter Book. It has replaced Jekyll with Sphinx and added many improvements.

Jupyter Book is an open-source project for building publication-quality books, websites, and documents from material that contains computation content. It is supported by the Executable Book Project, an open community that builds open-source tools for interactive and executable documents. Jupiter Book is still in beta.

One of the most notable changes is replacing Jekyll, which had been used for building books, with the documentation engine Sphinx. Also, instead of being a single repository, it has now been separated into several modular tools.

It now allows you to create either Jupyter Markdown or an extended version of markdown with publishing features.

It now lets you use Myst (Markedly Structured Text) Markdown, which is an implementation of Sphinx. It makes it possible to support syntax such as citations and cross-references, and use math and equations. By leveraging Sphinx, Jupyter Book can support more complex outputs, for example, they are prototyping PDF Outputs via HTML and LaTex. You can now insert code outputs into your content, or write entirely in Markdown.

It brings a better build system. Until this release, it used both Python and Jekyll to build the book’s HTML, but the new Juypyter Book only uses Python, which makes it more simple to build HTML. Another notable improvement is the utilization of JupyterCache, which avoids the need to re-execute code that has not been changed.

You can check out the new Jupiter Book documentation and code on the project website.

Jupyter Book
https://jupyterbook.org/intro.html
https://github.com/executablebooks/jupyter-book