# Notebooks with MyST Markdown — AReaL Documentation

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# Notebooks with MyST Markdown

Jupyter Book also lets you write text-based notebooks using MyST Markdown. See the Notebooks with MyST Markdown documentation for more detailed instructions. This page shows off a notebook written in MyST Markdown.

## An example cell

With MyST Markdown, you can define code cells with a directive like so:

    print(2 + 2)

    4

When your book is built, the contents of any `{code-cell}` blocks will be executed with your default Jupyter kernel, and their outputs will be displayed in-line with the rest of your content.

See also

Jupyter Book uses Jupytext to convert text-based files to notebooks, and can support many other text-based notebook files.

## Create a notebook with MyST Markdown

MyST Markdown notebooks are defined by two things:

1. YAML metadata that is needed to understand if / how it should convert text files to notebooks (including information about the kernel needed). See the YAML at the top of this page for example.

2. The presence of `{code-cell}` directives, which will be executed with your book.

That’s all that is needed to get started!

## Quickly add YAML metadata for MyST Notebooks

If you have a markdown file and you’d like to quickly add YAML metadata to it, so that Jupyter Book will treat it as a MyST Markdown Notebook, run the following command:

    jupyter-book myst init path/to/markdownfile.md