Sphinx Markdown

Sphinx Markdown Files
Sphinx Output Markdown
Sphinx Markdown Example
Sphinx Vs Markdown
Sphinx Markdown Math
Sphinx Markdown Links
Sphinx Make Markdown

MyST markdown provides a markdown equivalent of the reStructuredText syntax, meaning that you can do anything in MyST that you can do with reStructuredText. It is an attempt to have the best of both worlds: the flexibility and extensibility of Sphinx with the simplicity and readability of Markdown. MyST has the following main features. Advanced sphinx users may find an extension that builds a different type of output from the Sphinx AST such as sphinx-tojupyter which is an extension for building notebooks that only includes basic markdown. Sphinx can be configured to use markdown using the recommonmark extension. Recommonmark is strict and does not natively support tables or common extensions to markdown. Body copy ¶ Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.

Sorry if this has already been covered; I searched for a previous discussion and found none.

I’m wondering what the current thinking is on .md versus .rst files for package documentation. Markdown seems more popular at first glance, but reStructuredText seems to have more Python-specific tool support, including the ability to embed it in code documentation and publish on sites like readthedocs.

I’m not really looking to debate this topic; I just would like to know what’s considered best practice (if it exists).

Sphinx needs to be configured to use markdown. First, you need recommonmark: In conf.py, configure sourceparsers and sourcesuffix: Once Sphinx is configured appropriately, add sphinxmarkdowntables to extensions, like so: For more information on Sphinx and markdown, see the Sphinx documentation.
Write index.md and run make html. When m2r2 extension is enabled on sphinx and.md file is loaded, m2r2 converts to rst and pass to sphinx, not making new.rst file. Mdinclude directive. Include:: file directive,. Mdinclude:: file directive inserts markdown file at the line. Note: do not use. Include:: file directive to include markdown file even if in the markdown file, please.

In addition to Jupyter Notebook Markdown,Jupyter Book also supports a special flavour of Markdown called MyST (orMarkedly Structured Text).It was designed to make it easier to create publishable computational documents written with Markdown notation.It is a superset of CommonMark Markdown and draws heavy inspiration from the fantastic RMarkdown language from RStudio.

Whether you write your book’s content in Jupyter notebooks (.ipynb) or in regular Markdown files (.md),you’ll write in the same flavour of MyST Markdown. Jupyter Book will know how to parse both of them.

This page contains a few pieces of information about MyST Markdown and how it relates to Jupyter Book.You can find much more information about this flavour of Markdown atthe Myst Parser documentation.

Want to use RMarkdown directly?

See Custom notebook formats and Jupytext

Directives and roles¶

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 being used.

Directives¶

Directives customize the look, feel, and behaviour of your book.They are kind of like functions, and come in a variety of names with different behaviour.This section covers how to structure and use them.

At its simplest, you can use directives in your book like so:

This will only work if a directive with name mydirectivename already exists (which it doesn’t).There are many pre-defined directives associated with Jupyter Book.For example, to insert a note box into your content, you can use the following directive:

This results in:

Note

Here is a note

being inserted in your built book.

For more information on using directives, see the MyST documentation.

More arguments and metadata in directives¶

Many directives allow you to control their behaviour with extra pieces ofinformation. In addition to the directive name and the directive content,directives allow two other configuration points:

directive arguments - a list of words that come just after the {directivename}.

Here’s an example usage of directive arguments:

directive keywords - a collection of flags or key/value pairsthat come just underneath {directivename}.

There are two ways to write directive keywords, either as :key:val pairs, oras key:val pairs enclosed by --- lines. They both work the same way:

Here’s an example of directive keywords using the :key:val syntax:

and here’s an example of directive keywords using the enclosing --- syntax:

Tip

Remember, specifying directive keywords with :key: or --- will make no difference.We recommend using --- if you have many keywords you wish to specify, or if some valueswill span multiple lines. Use the :key:val syntax as a shorthand for just one or twokeywords.

For examples of how this is used, see the sections below.

Sphinx Markdown Files

Roles¶

Roles are very similar to directives, but they are less complex and writtenentirely in one line. You can use a role in your book withthis syntax:

Again, roles will only work if rolename is a valid role name.For example, the doc role can be used to refer to another page in your book.You can refer directly to another page by its relative path.For example, the syntax {doc}`../intro` will result in: Books with Jupyter.

Warning

It is currently a requirement for roles to be on the same line in your source file. It willnot be parsed correctly if it spans more than one line. Progress towards supporting rolesthat span multiple lines can be tracked by this issue

For more information on using roles, see the MyST documentation.

What roles and directives are available?¶

There is currently no single list of roles / directives to use as a reference, but thissection tries to give as much as information as possible. For those who are familiarwith the Sphinx ecosystem, you may use any directive / role that is available in Sphinx.This is because Jupyter Book uses Sphinx to build your book, and MyST Markdown supportsall syntax that Sphinx supports (think of it as a Markdown version of reStructuredText).

Caution

If you search the internet (and the links below) for information about roles and directives,the documentation will generally be written with reStructuredText in mind. MyST Markdownis different from reStructuredText, but all of the functionality should be the same.See the MyST Sphinx parser documentation for more information about the differences between MyST and rST.

For a list of directives that are available to you, there are three places to check:

The Sphinx directives pagehas a list of directives that are available by default in Sphinx.
The reStructuredText directives pagehas a list of directives in the Python “docutils” module.
This documentation has several additional directives that are specific to Jupyter Book.

What if it exists in rST but not MyST?

In some unusual cases, MyST may be incompatible with a certain role or directive.In this case, you can use the special eval-rst directive, to directly parse reStructuredText:

Sphinx Output Markdown

which produces

Note

A note written in reStructuredText.

Nesting content blocks in Markdown¶

If you’d like to nest content blocks inside one another in Markdown (forexample, to put a {note} inside of a {margin}), you may do so by addingextra backticks (`) to the outer-most block. This works for literalcode blocks as well.

For example, the following syntax:

yields

Sphinx Markdown Example

Thus, if you’d like to nest directives inside one another, you can take the sameapproach. For example, the following syntax:

produces:

Other MyST Markdown syntax¶

In addition to roles and directives, there are numerous other kinds of syntaxthat MyST Markdown supports.MyST supports all syntax of CommonMark Markdown (the kind of Markdown that Jupyter notebooks use), as well as an extended syntax that is used for scientific publishing.

The MyST-Parser is the tool that Jupyter Book uses to allow you to write your book content in MyST.It is also a good source of information about the MyST syntax.Here are some links you can use as a reference:

Sphinx Vs Markdown

What can I create with MyST Markdown?¶

Sphinx Markdown Math

See Special content blocks for an introduction to what you can do with MyST Markdownin Jupyter Book.In addition, the other pages in this site cover many more use-cases for how to use directives with MyST.

Tools for writing MyST Markdown¶

There is some support for MyST Markdown in tools across the community. Here we includea few prominent ones.

Jupyter interfaces¶

Sphinx Markdown Links

While MyST Markdown does not (yet) render in traditional Jupyter interfaces, mostof its syntax should “gracefully degrade”, meaning that you can still work withMyST in Jupyter, and then build your book with Jupyter Book.

Jupytext and text sync¶

For working with Jupyter notebook and Markdown files, we recommend jupytext,an open source tool for two-way conversion between .ipynb and text files.Jupytext supports the MyST Markdown format.

Note

For full compatibility with myst-parser, it is necessary to use jupytext>=1.6.0.

Sphinx Make Markdown

See also Convert a Jupytext file into a MyST notebook.

VS Code¶

If editing the Markdown files using VS Code, theVS Code MyST Markdown extensionprovides syntax highlighting and other features.