I have seen a few of the talks by iPython developers about how to convert an iPython notebook to a blog post or to an entire book (minute ~43). The PDF-to-X converter interprets the iPython cells which are written in markdown or code and spits out a newly formatted document in one step.
My problem is that I would like to generate a large document where many of the figures and sections are programmatically generated - something like this. For this to work in iPython using the methods above, I would need to be able to write a function that would write other iPython-Code-Blocks. Does this capability exist?
#some pseudocode to give an idea
for variable in list:
image = make_image(variable)
write_iPython_Markdown_Cell(variable)
write_iPython_Image_cell(image)
How can I achieve this?
There's a Notebook gist by Fernando Perez here that demonstrates how to programmatically create new cells. Note that you can also pass metadata in, so if you're generating a report and want to turn the notebook into a slideshow, you can easily indicate whether the cell should be a slide, sub-slide, fragment, etc.
You can add any kind of cell, so what you want is straightforward now (though it probably wasn't when the question was asked!). E.g., something like this (untested code) should work:
from IPython.nbformat import current as nbf
nb = nbf.new_notebook()
cells = []
for var in my_list:
# Assume make_image() saves an image to file and returns the filename
image_file = make_image(var)
text = "Variable: %s\n" % (var, image_file)
cell = nbf.new_text_cell('markdown', text)
cells.append(cell)
nb['worksheets'].append(nbf.new_worksheet(cells=cells))
with open('my_notebook.ipynb', 'w') as f:
nbf.write(nb, f, 'ipynb')