minimal example of how to export a jupyter notebook to pdf using nbconvert and PDFExporter() - pdf

Question

I am trying to export a pdf copy of a jupyter notebook using nbconvert from within a notebook cell. I have read the documentation, but I just cannot find some basic code to actually execute the nbconvert command and export to pdf.
I was able to get this far, but I was hoping that someone could just fill in the final gaps.
from nbconvert import PDFExporter
notebook_pdf = PDFExporter()
notebook_pdf.template_file = '../print_script/pdf_nocode.tplx'
Note sure how to get from here to actually getting the pdf created.
Any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

I'm no expert, but managed to get this working. The key is that you need to preprocess the notebook which will allow you to use the PDFExporter.from_notebook_node() function. This will give you your pdf_data in byte format that can then be written to file:
import nbformat
from nbconvert.preprocessors import ExecutePreprocessor
from nbconvert import PDFExporter
notebook_filename = "notebook.ipynb"
with open(notebook_filename) as f:
nb = nbformat.read(f, as_version=4)
ep = ExecutePreprocessor(timeout=600, kernel_name='python3')
ep.preprocess(nb, {'metadata': {'path': 'notebooks/'}})
pdf_exporter = PDFExporter()
pdf_data, resources = pdf_exporter.from_notebook_node(nb)
with open("notebook.pdf", "wb") as f:
f.write(pdf_data)
f.close()
It's worth noting that the ExecutePreprocessor requires the resources dict, but we don't use it in this example.

Answer 2

Following is rest api that convert .ipynb file into .html
POST: http://URL/export/<id>
Get: http://URL/export/<id> will return a id.html
import os
from flask import Flask, render_template, make_response
from flask_cors import CORS
from flask_restful import reqparse, abort, Api, Resource
from nbconvert.exporters import HTMLExporter
exporter = HTMLExporter()
app = Flask(__name__)
cors = CORS(app, resources={r"/export/*": {"origins": "*"}})
api = Api(app)
parser = reqparse.RequestParser()
parser.add_argument('path')
notebook_file_srv = '/path of your .ipynb file'
def notebook_doesnt_exist(nb):
abort(404, message="Notebook {} doesn't exist".format(nb))
class Notebook(Resource):
def get(self, id):
headers = {'Content-Type': 'text/html'}
return make_response(render_template(id + '.html'), 200, headers)
def post(self, id):
args = parser.parse_args()
notebook_file = args['path']
notebook_file = notebook_file_srv + id + '.ipynb'
if not os.path.exists(notebook_file):
return 'notebook \'.ipynb\' file not found', 404
else:
nb_name, _ = os.path.splitext(os.path.basename(notebook_file))
# dirname = os.path.dirname(notebook_file)
output_path = os.path.join(os.path.abspath(os.path.dirname(__file__)), 'templates')
output_path = os.path.join(output_path, '{}.html'.format(nb_name))
output, resources = exporter.from_filename(notebook_file)
f = open(output_path, 'wb')
f.write(output.encode('utf8'))
f.close()
return 'done', 201
api.add_resource(Notebook, '/export/<id>')
if __name__ == '__main__':
app.run(debug=True)