PDF Generation and Filtering¶
Otter includes a tool for generating PDFs of notebooks that optionally incorporates notebook filtering for generating PDFs for manual grading. There are two options for exporting PDFs:
PDF via LaTeX: this uses nbconvert, pandoc, and LaTeX to generate PDFs from TeX files
PDF via HTML: this uses wkhtmltopdf and the Python packages pdfkit and PyPDF2 to generate PDFs from HTML files
Otter Export is used by Otter Assign to generate Gradescope PDF templates and solutions, in the
Gradescope autograder to generate the PDFs of notebooks, by otter.Notebook to generate PDFs and
in Otter Grade when PDFs are requested.
Cell Filtering¶
Otter Export uses HTML comments in Markdown cells to perform cell filtering. Filtering is the default behavior of most exporter implementations, but not of the exporter itself.
You can place HTML comments in Markdown cells to capture everything in between them in the output.
To start a filtering group, place the comment <!-- BEGIN QUESTION --> whereever you want to
start exporting and place <!-- END QUESTION --> at the end of the filtering group. Everything
capture between these comments will be exported, and everything outside them removed. You can have
multiple filtering groups in a notebook. When using Otter Export, you can also optionally add page
breaks after an <!-- END QUESTION --> by setting pagebreaks=True in
otter.export.export_notebook or using the corresponding flags/arguments in whichever utility is
calling Otter Export.