Inline variable insertion in markdown

[fperez]

@stefanv

I probably didn’t express myself clearly, but what I was asking is exactly this: whether what we need (adding a new cell type and rendering it in a special way with kernel interaction) is doable as an extension.

I had a gut feel that it might require some surgery in the core of JupyterLab itself, but I would be glad if that weren’t the case (it would make our job here much easier!).

Further I was pointing out that proving the viability of a pre/postprocessing or cell magic approach isn’t all that interesting (to me), because we already know that will work—it’s just very clunky.

The post-processing version may still have different needs from the live/interactive one, as there may be different output constraints on say a static PDF output compared to a JS-rendered one in a browser (just like the nice HTML render of say pandas dataframes doesn’t quite make it to LaTeX output).

But as to your first question: without having tried to build it, I’m not 100% sure that Lab right now has all the right APIs for this (I don’t know them well enough). However, I can imagine a number of ways to try and build this as a Lab extension that should work, and where if they hit a wall, the answer at first might be to request a given API improvement in Lab (which isn’t an immutable entity ) to facilitate things…

But for example, here @jasongrout pointed out some ideas on how to write a custom cell provider in Lab… It’s under-documented ATM but seems viable, so I do think we have the starting points we need…