Constellate Directives

Ideally Constellate could produce the output you want with any Jupyter notebook without any kind of extra information. However, in some cases Constellate can't deduce what you want and you have to add some extra information. That extra information is given in the form of directives. Directives are lines at the beginning of cells that start with #constellate: . Here are the directives Constellate currently uses:

  • #constellate: ignore makes Constellate ignore the cell it appears in. It won't affect document structure or render at all. This can be used for cells that set up some aspect of the Jupyter notebook environment, like installing packages, or whenever you want to do something without it rendering in the output.
  • #constellate: setup marks a cell as a setup cell. Setup cells contain Python code that is run before plots are generated. Use it to import libraries, define custom functions, set constants, or whatever else. These cells do not appear in the final output and do not affect document structure. They are run in the order they appear, but they are all run before generating a plot: this means that setup cells can affect the output of cells that are before them in the notebook.
  • #constellate: latex indicates that a Markdown cell should be rendered as an image of LaTeX and not as a separate text cell. (This will be explained in more detail later.)
  • #constellate: setup_[backend] marks a cell as a setup cell that only applies to a specific kind of plot. For example, setup_matplotlib is only run before Matplotlib output. Backends will be discussed in more detail later.

Constellate Directives

Ideally Constellate could produce the output you want with any Jupyter notebook without any kind of extra information. However, in some cases Constellate can't deduce what you want and you have to add some extra information. That extra information is given in the form of directives. Directives are lines at the beginning of cells that start with #constellate: . Here are the directives Constellate currently uses:

  • #constellate: ignore makes Constellate ignore the cell it appears in. It won't affect document structure or render at all. This can be used for cells that set up some aspect of the Jupyter notebook environment, like installing packages, or whenever you want to do something without it rendering in the output.
  • #constellate: setup marks a cell as a setup cell. Setup cells contain Python code that is run before plots are generated. Use it to import libraries, define custom functions, set constants, or whatever else. These cells do not appear in the final output and do not affect document structure. They are run in the order they appear, but they are all run before generating a plot: this means that setup cells can affect the output of cells that are before them in the notebook.
  • #constellate: latex indicates that a Markdown cell should be rendered as an image of LaTeX and not as a separate text cell. (This will be explained in more detail later.)
  • #constellate: setup_[backend] marks a cell as a setup cell that only applies to a specific kind of plot. For example, setup_matplotlib is only run before Matplotlib output. Backends will be discussed in more detail later.