How to render pd.DataFrame table in pdf with nbconvert+pandoc

Question

I am generating a pdf from a set of Jupyter notebooks. For each .ipynb file, I'm running

$ jupyter-nbconvert --to markdown Untitled1.ipynb

and then merging them together with:

$ pandoc Untitled1.md [Untitled2.md ...] -f gfm --pdf-engine=pdflatex -o all_notebooks.pdf

(I am mostly following the example here.) One thing I noticed is that the pandas DataFrames, e.g.

import pandas as pd
df = pd.DataFrame({'a':[1,2,3]})
df.head()

are rendered in the pdf as

rather than

Any idea how to fix this issue, please? I am using $ jupyter-nbconvert --version 5.6.1 and $ pandoc --version 2.9.2.1. In the md file the table turns into the html block below. I suspect pandoc does not interpret it correctly. I tried the from-markdown-strict option suggested here, without any luck.

Thank you!

<div>
<style scoped>
    .dataframe tbody tr th:only-of-type {
        vertical-align: middle;
    }

    .dataframe tbody tr th {
        vertical-align: top;
    }

    .dataframe thead th {
        text-align: right;
    }
</style>
<table border="1" class="dataframe">
  <thead>
    <tr style="text-align: right;">
      <th></th>
      <th>a</th>
    </tr>
  </thead>
  <tbody>
    <tr>
      <th>0</th>
      <td>1</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <th>1</th>
      <td>2</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <th>2</th>
      <td>3</td>
    </tr>
  </tbody>
</table>
</div>

Answer 1

The issue here is that nbconvert sees the DataFrames as HTML (plus the styling, which you're seeing in the output, issue here), which gets ignored by pandoc's Markdown converter.

One way around this is to change pandas' behavior to not write out DataFrames as HTML in notebooks. You can do this by setting the option at the top of each notebook:

pd.set_option("display.notebook_repr_html", False)

Another option is to use the HTML representation as the intermediate step rather than Markdown:

$ jupyter-nbconvert --to html Untitled1.ipynb
$ pandoc Untitled1.html -t latex --pdf-engine=pdflatex -o all_notebooks.pdf

And of course if you don't need to do other formatting, you can just save your notebooks directly as pdfs:

jupyter-nbconvert --to pdf Untitled1.ipynb

(To combine multiple notebooks, see the discussion here.)