Transfer the contents of a notebook to the posts on this site?

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I am looking for an efficient way to transfer the contents of a Mathematica Notebook to a post on this site. It’s extremely tedious to do this copying and pasting cell by cell. I also tried copying and pasting as images, but the resolution is too low.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

Whats needed is an efficient mechanism for importing a nb file, or at the very least, a pdf.

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PDF would be much more difficult to implement, NB would be much easier… One could make a script that takes a NB file, converts all the sections and so on accordingly, and exports all the images. This would simplify the posting already considerably.

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No so much. For example, there is a Wordpress plug-in that displays a pdf on a web page. Something like that would work well here.

You can already convert a Notebook and save it in html format, which saves all the graphics separately and then paste them one by one into the post. That’s what I did. It’s extremely slow, tedious and error-prone. It’s one of the main reasons why I don’t post more articles on the site.

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Showing it as PDF is easy yeah, but not so nice, and near impossible to control. I meant converting the PDF back to html; that is much more tricky, unless you’re satisfied by just stills of course…

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The Wordpress plug-in works very nicely indeed and is trivially easy to use. No need to convert to html. The only downside is that you can’t copy/paste code. For example, see the same article posted as a pdf on my own web site here.

But, I agree, it would be much better if there was a mechanism that allowed you to import a Mathematica Notebook, or cdf, or an embedded link to a Wolfram Cloud object.

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I’m quite sure they will never do it though, there are some concerns, difficulties, and limitations:

  1. Potential to have exploits inside PDF files.
  2. It can contain custom fonts that makes the site look very ‘un-even’, all the styles will be more or less random and not standardized. Not to mention different page-sizes, and orientations.
  3. Searching is much more tricky (and slower) in PDF than in plain text.
  4. As you said, copy-paste is tricker, though not impossible…
  5. Not each operating system/browser has equal PDF support, and the experience might differ a lot between systems, especially for mobile devices…
  6. A lot of people are already incredibly lazy when it comes to making a good post (i.e. I have a problem, please help, here is the notebook). I suspect this will make it even worse…
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Well, then, I suppose the best solution would be a mechanism to allow the import of an html folder, resolving all the links. Then you can just save a Notebook in html format and upload the html folder created by Mathematica. Easy!

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I once started nb to markdown converter but I didn’t have time to polish it. It is usable though:

How to export a Mathematica notebook into Markdown?

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