import standard Mathematica notebook

[sunt05]

This is indeed brilliant work!

Just curious about if there's any plan to add the feature for importing the standard Mathematica notebook (i.e. .nb files) into the vs code environment. I think that would be a big step to enhance WL adoption.

[njpipeorgan]

Thanks! I do have this plan of importing .nb notebooks, but the complexity of .nb notebooks will be a problem--here are a few examples:

• input cells may contain two-dimensional expressions (and images!), which cannot be represented in vscode notebooks (maybe using their input forms?)
• output cells may contain very large expressions, which takes a long to render, which is probably okay.
• other cells should be converted to markdown cells in vscode notebooks, but it can be quite tricky to parse the expressions and get a visually appealing markdown in terms of styling.

To what level do you think the importing feature will be usable?

[sunt05]

My intention for this feature is simply to ease the access of my Mathematica code in .nb files, which are mostly written with cells of different default styles including header, text, code and in/output.

Given the popularity of jupyter notebooks (i.e. .ipynb), I think equivalent functionality as in .ipynb should be enough for the vs code environment: it's not necessary to achieve full compatibility between .nb and .wlnb/.ipynb; otherwise, folks can use Mathematica instead.

While for your examples/concerns above, I fully understand the underlying difficulties; but I'm wondering if this project would be useful? https://github.com/oovm/JupyterConvert Potentially, the JupyterConvert utility may serve as a connector between .nb and .wlnb (i.e. .nb-->ipynb-->.wlnb)?

[njpipeorgan]

Sounds great, I'll check out JupyterConvert.