minimal example of how to export a jupyter notebook to pdf using nbconvert and PDFExporter()

I am trying to export a pdf copy of a jupyter notebook using nbconvert from within a notebook cell. I have read the documentation, but I just cannot find some basic code to actually execute the nbconvert command and export to pdf.

I was able to get this far, but I was hoping that someone could just fill in the final gaps.

from nbconvert import PDFExporter
notebook_pdf = PDFExporter()
notebook_pdf.template_file = '../print_script/pdf_nocode.tplx'

Note sure how to get from here to actually getting the pdf created.

Any help would be appreciated.

Solution

I'm no expert, but managed to get this working. The key is that you need to preprocess the notebook which will allow you to use the PDFExporter.from_notebook_node() function. This will give you your pdf_data in byte format that can then be written to file:

import nbformat
from nbconvert.preprocessors import ExecutePreprocessor
from nbconvert import PDFExporter

notebook_filename = "notebook.ipynb"

with open(notebook_filename) as f:
    nb = nbformat.read(f, as_version=4)

ep = ExecutePreprocessor(timeout=600, kernel_name='python3')

ep.preprocess(nb, {'metadata': {'path': 'notebooks/'}})

pdf_exporter = PDFExporter()

pdf_data, resources = pdf_exporter.from_notebook_node(nb)

with open("notebook.pdf", "wb") as f:
    f.write(pdf_data)
    f.close()

It's worth noting that the ExecutePreprocessor requires the resources dict, but we don't use it in this example.