In this recipe, you'll learn how to export an IPython Notebook to a PDF file. There are two methods which you can try. If the first works for you, then great, but if it doesn't, then try Method 2.
Before attempting a conversion to PDF, add the following line to your ~/.jupyter/jupyter_nbconvert_config.py file. You may need to create this file:
c.ExecutePreprocessor.timeout = 300
This will ensure that a PDF can be generated, and it won't timeout while running the notebook, which can happen, especially if you're importing a few million rows to run through an analysis. Depending on how much data your notebook needs to import before running, you may need to increase or decrease the timeout value.
- First, install Pandoc (http://pandoc.org/installing.html). Pandoc is a swiss-army knife for converting files from one markup format into another, and can be installed on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.
- Next, you need to install LaTeX. On the Mac, you can download MacTeX (http://tug.org/mactex/mactex-download.html). For other operating systems, visit the LaTeX website (https://latex-project.org/ftp.html), and download the software for your operating system.
Once everything is installed, change into the directory where your notebook file is and run the following command:
jupyter nbconvert --to pdf --execute 'name_of_notebook.ipynb'
This looks almost identical to the previous recipe with one exception—instead of using --to html, we are using --to pdf.
If you try this and it does not work, try Method 2.
If Method 1 fails due to library conflicts on your computer, you can use wkhmltopdf, another open source command-line tool, to convert your notebook to a PDF.
First, install wkhtmltopdf by visiting http://wkhtmltopdf.org/index.html and downloading the version for your operating system.
Next, convert the notebook to HTML using the command that we saw in the previous recipe:
jupyter nbconvert –to html –execute 'name_of_notebook.ipynb'
After that, use wkhtmltopdf to convert the HTML file to a PDF file:
wkhtmltopdf name_of_notebook.html name_of_notebook.pdf