Markdown Files

Whether you write your book’s content in Jupyter Notebooks (.ipynb) or in regular markdown files (.md), you’ll write in the same flavor of markdown called MyST Markdown. This is a simple file to help you get started and show off some syntax.

What is MyST?

MyST stands for “Markedly Structured Text”. It is a slight variation on a flavor of markdown called “CommonMark” markdown, with small syntax extensions to allow you to write roles and directives in the Sphinx ecosystem.

For more about MyST, see the MyST Markdown Overview.

Sample Roles and Directives

Roles and directives are two of the most powerful tools in Jupyter Book. They are kind of like functions, but written in a markup language. They both serve a similar purpose, but roles are written in one line, whereas directives span many lines. They both accept different kinds of inputs, and what they do with those inputs depends on the specific role or directive that is being called.

Here is a “note” directive:

Note

Here is a note

It will be rendered in a special box when you build your book.

Here is an inline directive to refer to a document: Notebooks with MyST Markdown.

Citations

You can also cite references that are stored in a bibtex file. For example, the following syntax: {cite}`holdgraf_evidence_2014` will render like this: [].

Moreover, you can insert a bibliography into your page with this syntax: The {bibliography} directive must be used for all the {cite} roles to render properly. For example, if the references for your book are stored in references.bib, then the bibliography is inserted with:

Dat03

C. J. Date. Introduction to Database Systems, An. Pearson, Boston, 8th edition edition, July 2003. ISBN 978-0-321-19784-9.

EN15

Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant Navathe. Fundamentals of Database Systems. Pearson, Hoboken, NJ, 7th edition edition, June 2015. ISBN 978-0-13-397077-7.

OSG

PostGIS PSC & OSGeo. Introduction to PostGIS. URL: https://postgis.net/workshops/postgis-intro/ (visited on 2023-08-14).

PWV+16

Edzer Pebesma, Wolfang Wagner, Jan Verbesselt, Erwin Goor, Christian Briese, and Markus Neteler. OpenEO: a GDAL for Earth Observation Analytics. 2016. URL: https://r-spatial.org/2016/11/29/openeo.html (visited on 2021-12-31).

SKS19

Abraham Silberschatz, Henry Korth, and S. Sudarshan. Database System Concepts. McGraw-Hill Education, New York, NY, 7th edition edition, April 2019. ISBN 978-1-260-08450-4.

Learn more

This is just a simple starter to get you started. You can learn a lot more at jupyterbook.org.