# Franklin and Pluto play smoothly together (not quite yet)

**URL:** <https://discourse.julialang.org/t/franklin-and-pluto-play-smoothly-together-not-quite-yet/61002>\
**Category:** Tooling\
**Tags:** pluto, franklin\
**Created:** [May 12, 2021, 7:08am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/franklin-and-pluto-play-smoothly-together-not-quite-yet/61002 "2021-05-12T07:08:52Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Iagoba\_Apellaniz](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/iagoba_apellaniz/32/34406_2.png) [@Iagoba\_Apellaniz](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/Iagoba_Apellaniz)\
**Post date:** [May 12, 2021, 7:08am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/franklin-and-pluto-play-smoothly-together-not-quite-yet/61002/1 "2021-05-12T07:08:52Z")

</div>

I really ❤ [Pluto.jl](https://github.com/fonsp/Pluto.jl) as I ❤ [Franklin.jl](https://franklinjl.org/) too.

Wouldn’t be wonderful if both frameworks have more things in common? Franklin uses markdown to create static websites at the same time that can run julia code and render the result. While Pluto utilizes julia files to generate rich content at the same time that works as a development environment.

My concern is that they both could do things more closely together. In other words, here are a couple of points that can be done similarly:

- Why Franklin uses KaTeX and Pluto uses MathJax?
- Could the equations be indexed in Pluto, so one can reference them across the same notebook?
- Would it be feasible to take a notebook file and render it out of the box in Franklin? In other words, could Franklin detect notebook scripts and create the appropriate layout for it? (idea sown below) Of course, the small button on the top-right corner could be used to download the notebook.  
 ![Sin nombre](https://global.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/original/3X/4/b/4b697371416edcf0fc4171152e87d47158820dae.png)

This could improve the way textbooks are understood. One may have many static and very content rich pages, with videos, pictures, chunks of code, formulas, references, footnotes, cross-references, … without losing the opportunity to share a pluto notebook in an elegant way.

Let me know what you think. I ping the main developers of Franklin and Pluto (@tlienart and @fonsp respectively). Sorry if I bother you with this post. I also link another similar but not equal post: [Website via Franklin.jl from Pluto.jl notebooks](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/website-via-franklin-jl-from-pluto-jl-notebooks/55703)

UPDATE: I hope I have time on summer to try this things by miself, so I contribute as much as I can.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![tlienart](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/tlienart/32/7640_2.png) [@tlienart](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/tlienart)\
**Post date:** [May 12, 2021, 9:39am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/franklin-and-pluto-play-smoothly-together-not-quite-yet/61002/2 "2021-05-12T09:39:00Z")

</div>

Fons has already done a lot of work towards tight integration of the two as displayed in [the computational thinking website](https://computationalthinking.mit.edu/Spring21/), there’s an open issue [Support Pluto notebooks in Franklin · Issue #813 · tlienart/Franklin.jl · GitHub](https://github.com/tlienart/Franklin.jl/issues/813) to streamline what he’s done from the Franklin side which I’ll get to soon.

PS: as a side note while Franklin gets you started with KaTex and facilitates that integration, it doesn’t prevent a user from using MathJax so the fact that Pluto uses MJ is not a blocker.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Iagoba\_Apellaniz](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/iagoba_apellaniz/32/34406_2.png) [@Iagoba\_Apellaniz](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/Iagoba_Apellaniz)\
**Post date:** [May 12, 2021, 12:17pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/franklin-and-pluto-play-smoothly-together-not-quite-yet/61002/3 "2021-05-12T12:17:30Z")

</div>

You both are the best! Thank you for your work! Things can only get better over time. I’ll do all I can do to go in this direction.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![StatisticalMouse](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/statisticalmouse/32/43370_2.png) [@StatisticalMouse](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/StatisticalMouse)\
**Post date:** [May 24, 2021, 6:03am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/franklin-and-pluto-play-smoothly-together-not-quite-yet/61002/4 "2021-05-24T06:03:02Z")

</div>

I could use some advice in this matter. I need to re-do my blog that’s hosted in github pages, and I need a solution that works now, not after the summer. It doesn’t have to be automatic.

What I have right now is a Franklin web page that links to Jupyter notebooks in github. It works because github can display the jupyter notebooks (most of the time). It’s rather cumbersome to maintain, and not that good for a user to use.

Just about the only blog post I did (I started with Julia a short time before I wrote this): [Simple moving average speed comparison in Julia, Python and R](https://statisticalmice.github.io/posts/simple-moving-average-comparison/)

What I need at minimum is to be able to have a static rendering of a Pluto notebook (after computation) shown as a Franklin page.

I **could** set up a server for doing Pluto like the Computational thinking pages, but then the question is why should I use Franklin? (I don’t have an alternative in mind yet.)

In December my thoughts about Pluto were that it wasn’t mature enough compared to Jupyter, but I think that’s changed/changing.