Announcing the Jupyter Book 2 alpha
Cross-posted from the Jupyter Book blog. Note that some MyST functionality is not supported on the 2i2c website – please see the original post for previews.
Over the last ten months, the Jupyter Book team have been hard at work; Jupyter Book has become a Jupyter subproject, and the team1 announced a plan to release Jupyter Book 2. This post announces the alpha release of Jupyter Book 2.0, which has been re-written from the ground up to use the new MyST-MD engine.
Over the next few months, we will work in preparation for the full release of Jupyter Book 2. Stay tuned for more! The initial documentation for the alpha release can be found at:
Install the Jupyter Book 2 Alpha #
The Jupyter Book 2 alpha is available from PyPI.org. You can install it with pip, using
pip install -U jupyter-book==2.0.0a0
If you use pipx, it’s recommened to run Jupyter Book 2 using
pipx run jupyter-book==2.0.0a0
Jupyter Book 2 needs Node.js installed on your computer. If this is not the case, running jupyter book will prompt you to install it using the nodeenv package that ships with Jupyter Book 2:
❗ Node.js (node) is required to run Jupyter Book, but could not be found`.
❔ Install Node.js in '...'? (y/N):
Press y and Enter to proceed.
The Jupyter Book 2 project is a complete re-write of Jupyter Book. We expect there to be bugs and breakages! Please use our support channels to keep us up to date with your findings!
New Features in 2.0 alpha
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Rich Hover Previews #
The new MyST book and article themes provide useful hover previews for links to other MyST content, Wikipedia, GitHub issues, and many more.
Share & Embed Content #
Content from other websites built with the MyST engine can be embedded in your own sites and PDFs:
Simple Instant Search #
A new client-side search uses a simple, modern algorithm for fast local search that finds the results that you care about.
High Quality PDFs #
PDF documents can now be built with Typst, a high-quality typesetting engine that produces readable error messages and beautiful documents. This feature was the basis for the 2024 SciPy proceedings, which is now built on MyST Markdown and will be accepting Jupyter Notebooks in 2025.
Coming Soon in 2.0 beta
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Custom Styles & Scrips #
Jupyter Book 2 will make it easy to tweak your website styles, and add new website behaviors.
Generate Markdown from Code Cells #
The MyST engine is on-track to support the inclusion of references and other markup features generated by code cells.
Control Cell Visibility with Tags #
In the beta release, Jupyter Book 2 will once-again be able to show and hide content according to cell tags.
Jupyter Book 2 vs MyST-MD #
At this early stage, the new Jupyter Book application jupyter book behaves identically to the mystmd engine that it is built upon; as outlined in
our Jupyter Book 2 plan, we intend for Jupyter Book to be an “opinionated distribution” of mystmd that shares the same configuration format and CLI. This contrasts with Jupyter Book 1, which was built on top of the Sphinx documentation engine, but offered its own CLI and configuration files. In future, the jupyter book and mystmd CLIs may diverge from one another, but we expect that this will be handled in a graceful manner: mystmd commands should always be compatible with the jupyter book application.
Jupyter Book project has historically been a technical project of the Executable Books organisation. In 2024, the establishment of a Jupyter subproject means that the Jupyter Book project now has its own identity outside of Executable Books. ↩︎
