MystMD as an alternative to JupyterBook

[scottyhq]

Just documenting a new tool to be aware of, not necessary advocating we use it for hackweeks! But I came across this blog post via 2i2c slack about cross linking content across webpages (even interactive figures) which is pretty impressive.
https://curvenote.com/blog/open-science-reuse

There seems to be a lot of development going into mystmd currently more detail here

https://mystmd.org/guide/background

TLDR. mystmd is a javascript-based parser of "myst markdown" while jupyterbook is a python-based parser of "myst markdown". jupyterbook uses sphinx behind the scenes which is mostly focused on technical software documentation, but mystmd is sticking more to web-development tools for fancy websites. And taken from the above docs:

Jupyter Books are an excellent medium for tutorials, textbooks & software documentation but are currently less well suited to content such as blogs, lab-websites, and journal articles. Additionally, JupyterBook cannot create scientific PDFs that are submission ready.

[scottyhq]

And the roadmap for jupyterbook v2 is to switch to the mystmd JavaScript tooling https://executablebooks.org/en/latest/blog/2024-05-20-jupyter-book-myst/

[scottyhq]

Tried this again today as an alpha release is on pypi and conda-forge
https://blog.jupyterbook.org/posts/2024-11-15-jupyter-book-2-alpha

Opened a discussion to get more ideas of using mystmd directly versus jupyterbook2 distribution https://github.com/orgs/jupyter-book/discussions/1774