Jupyter Notebook and Markdown (part 1)

I would like to show you how to start with a Jupyter Notebook in 10 minutes, using Markdown.

The Jupyter Notebook is an open-source web application. Using Jupyter you can create and share documents that contain live code, equations, visualizations and narrative text.

By mixing code (Python for example) and rich text (with Markdown) you can make your Notebooks more readable and sharable within your team.

Markdown is a way to style text on the web (similar to HTML). You control the display and the style of the documents, you can add images, you can create lists in a very easy way. We could say that Markdown is plain text with a few non-alphabetic characters thrown in, like “#” or “*”.

First of all, open your Jupyter Notebook and select “Markdown” in the dropdown menù for your cell

Then you can write your text…

…and click “Run” to see how it works

If you want to try on your Notebook copy and paste

You could make some words **bold** some words *italic* with Markdown. You can even [visit our website!](http://virtualmente.ch)

Do you need headers?
Use the “#”! (look at the example)

Click “run” and this is the result:

Copy&paste from here

# Header 1
## Header 2
### Header 3

Now let’s try to work with lists. We have two options, unordered lists and ordereds list.
The first one is very simple, if you want to create an unordered list write something like:

Click “Run”

Amazing!
Copy&Paste

- object 1
- object 2
- object 3

And if you want an ordered list instead? Pretty easy…

Click “Run”

Copy&Paste from here

1. object 1
1. object 2
1. object 3
1. object 4
1. object 5
1. object 6

NB you can also not number the list sequentially (like in my example), Markdown will do it automatically for you.

“Ok, fine but I need to work with lists and sub-lists…is it possible?”
Yes, Sir! Look at the following example:

Run the cell again and…

If you want to emphasize your text with red, for example, you have to inline some HTML with Markdown and you can do it in several ways

Click “Run” to see your red text

Copy&Paste

<span style="color:red">SOME RED TEXT</span> <br>
<font color="red">SOME RED TEXT</font>

You can also emphasize your text with Bold and Italic

Click “Run”

Copy&Paste

*This text is italic*
_This is also italic_

**This text is bold**
__This is also bold__

You can combine **bold** and *italic*

This is the simplest and basic way to use a Notebook, in the next blog post I’ll show you to do something more exciting!
See you soon with the second part of the article!