Comparison to Jupyter notebooks

[bymayanksingh]

could you provide more clarification on without hidden state that supports any text editor as written in handout's README?

[epogrebnyak]

There are two parts:

• you can use Handout in any text editor, it is the same as editing any plait test script file
• the script does not have a hidden state as opposed to Jupyter notebook

As for the state in Jupyter notebooks you can refer to a presentation by Joel Grus, for example.

[bymayanksingh]

@epogrebnyak that presentation was convincing to me, hidden states can be real pain.

handout is a great alternative, what else do we have or we plan to have in handout that jupyter fails at?

[epogrebnyak]

@code-monk08: the list of planned features is as follows, the more important one is discussion of output formats in #9.

#25 is a bit about interactive use, #12 deal with Sweave family of tools. Also a good TOC here.

Please feel free to contribute your workflow example or feature request.

[danijar]

As @epogrebnyak pointed out, the main differences are:

• You can use your own Python editor of IDE rather than the web editor of Jupyter that doesn't seem suitable for power users, at least to me. Running locally can also make it easier to handle files.
• There is no hidden state and communication only goes from the Python script to the rendered handout, not the other way around.
• Handout being a library means that you can import your resulting script from other files, although I'm not sure if this happens often.
• You can add custom JavaScript with a single function call, for example to support extended Markdown, UML diagrams, or other markup formats.
• The result being a static HTML page makes it a bit simpler to integrate into a blog post or website than a Jupyter notebook, although this is also certainly possible.

What else? You're ideas are welcome! :)

[bymayanksingh]

What else? You're ideas are welcome! :)

I think this is already in discussion but adding in more options where one can customize the output HTML even further will be nice..

also I have feature wise implementation ideas.. I will comment those on respective issues.