I’m going to be using Jupyter notebooks for the first time in a course I’m teaching (previously I have been using Sage notebooks and python scripting). I’d like to be able to share my notebooks with tutors and eventually students as both notebook but also pdfs. Thankfully the jupyter-nbconverte command lets you easily convert notebooks to more or less whatever you want. Below is a make file that will automatically check if any notebook files have changed and if they have convert them to pdf.

Save the following in a file called makefile:

nbs = $(wildcard *.ipynb)
pdfs = $(nbs:%.ipynb=%.pdf)

all: $(pdfs)

%.pdf: %.ipynb
        jupyter-nbconvert --to pdf $<;

Here it is as a gist

To run that file simply type make and it’ll convert all your notebooks to pdf.