Tutorial 1: Writing Content in MyST Markdown

Tutorial 1: Writing Content in MyST Markdown¶

MyST (Markedly Structured Text) is the markup language powering this book. It extends standard Markdown with directives and roles that produce rich, structured scientific content.

Why MyST instead of notebooks?¶

MyST .md files are the source of truth for a course built with the kit. Jupyter notebooks (.ipynb) are generated automatically by CI — you never edit them by hand.

Benefits:

• Clean git diffs — no output noise, no cell metadata churn

• Human-readable — readable in any text editor

• Full Jupyter execution at build time and in-browser via JupyterLite

Basic Markdown¶

Everything standard Markdown supports works in MyST:

• Bold, italic, inline code

• Links

• Images: ![alt text](images/image.png) (see Tutorial 3 for where files go)

Admonitions¶

Use admonitions to call out notes, warnings, and exercises:

Code cells¶

Add executable code with the {code-cell} directive:

Hiding cells¶

Tag cells to control visibility:

Summary¶

• Write prose in plain Markdown

• Use {code-cell} for executable code

• Use admonitions to structure exercises and notes

• Tag cells with hide-input or remove-cell to control what students see