🧠 MyST vs Jupyter Book

Choosing the right tool for scientific publishing, technical documentation, and reproducible research

Introduction

In the evolving world of scientific publishing, reproducible research, and interactive documentation, both MyST and Jupyter Book have become powerful tools for authors, educators, and developers. While these tools are deeply intertwined — Jupyter Book 2 is built on top of the MyST ecosystem — they serve slightly different purposes and audiences.

MyST (Markedly Structured Text) is a Markdown flavor designed to bring the power of LaTeX and reStructuredText into a familiar Markdown syntax. It’s the foundation of modern scientific content authoring in the executable books ecosystem. MyST allows users to write rich, structured documents with support for equations, directives, references, and more, using either .md or .myst files.

Jupyter Book 2, on the other hand, is a full publishing toolchain built around MyST. It helps you organize notebooks, Markdown files, and computational content into polished, multi-format books and documentation. It handles features like table of contents, citations, interactive code execution, PDF/HTML/EPUB export, and theme customization.

🚀 Overview