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Comment by jofer | Hacker News Reader

By "this json file", do you mean the ipython notebook itself? (It's saved as JSON behind-the-scenes. That's what you'll get if you click "download notebook".)

If so, yes, that's what a saved ipython notebook is. See: http://ipython.org/notebook.html for an overview of ipython notebooks.

You can export it to html, latex, etc using "ipython nbconvert --to <format_you_want>". See: http://ipython.org/ipython-doc/dev/interactive/notebook.html...

Basically, the website you're seeing (nbviewer) hosts ipython notebooks (json files) and converts them to static html for viewing.

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What's the best way to install ipython on a Mac? Mine's from Macports, and I have ipython notebook, but when I try to use nbconvert I'm told I'm missing pandoc. A 'port install pandoc' wants to install yet another copy of gcc (I have two--including one from Macports for another ipython dependency), ghc, and about three dozen packages prefixed with 'hs'.

Is there any nice bundle of everything you need for ipython, for the Mac, that's both easy to install and uninstall?

If you just want to install pandoc so you can convert things, see: http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/installing.html (There's an OSX binary there)

Seeing as how you already have a functioning install of ipython and a setup you're otherwise happy with, this is probably the easiest route.

Also, just so it's clear what's going on, ipython notebooks and (especially) format conversion are optional (but very useful) parts of ipython. They're not part of the core functionality, so `pandoc` isn't a strict requirement to build ipython.

Otherwise, as long as you don't mind switching the python interpreter, etc as well, look into Anaconda or Canopy. I'm not 100% sure if either comes with pandoc, but they're stand-alone scientific python distributions that make it a good bit easier to get ipython, numpy, matplotlib, etc set up.

Thanks for the pandoc link, I'll try that tonight. My ipython does already have notebook, numpy, matplotlib, and more set-up; I didn't realize I was missing anything till I tried nbconvert.

But I've just recently installed all this, and have only kicked it around a little. Mostly, I wanted plotting.

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