Always use .Rmd as main format, take output from .ipynb.

I really like the idea of having a synchronized copy of .Rmd and .ipynb. That’s basically the jupyter-way of having a nb.html file and gives us the best of two worlds: a text-editable, version-controllable Rmd file and an easily-sharable, output-preserving ipynb file.

I would suggest to pull the output out of the corresponding .ipynb file, even when opening .Rmd. That solves the issue that one could accidentically overwrite changes made to the .Rmd file in an external editor when opening the corresponding .ipynb file because one would like to retrieve contents.

I suggest the following procedure:

• when opening either .ipynb or .Rmd, check if both .Rmd and .ipynb are available
• check cell-by-cell if the ‘code’ parts are identical
• if yes, retrieve output from ipynb
• if no, discard all outputs and load code from Rmd.

[abalter]

I think this is somewhat uncharted territory. The notebook formats are good for use in IDEs and the script format for batch execution. Moreover, notebook formats are good for development and debugging. There are a whole range of different development patterns to explore. I’m going to put together a more detailed description of what we have been considering as I think it might be useful for further development.

Overall, jupytext is amazing, and something I’ve been really waiting for to come along!

[stefanuddenberg]

Sure; I’ll open an issue for it later today with an example. Thanks!