# How to get help on a Julia command on a Jupyter notebook?

**URL:** <https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-to-get-help-on-a-julia-command-on-a-jupyter-notebook/112976>\
**Category:** New to Julia\
**Tags:** question\
**Created:** [April 15, 2024, 7:47pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-to-get-help-on-a-julia-command-on-a-jupyter-notebook/112976 "2024-04-15T19:47:23Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 6

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**Author:** ![stevengj](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/stevengj/32/71_2.png) [@stevengj](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/stevengj)\
**Post date:** [April 15, 2024, 8:47pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-to-get-help-on-a-julia-command-on-a-jupyter-notebook/112976/6 "2024-04-15T20:47:11Z")

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`?` parses for me if I choose “Jupyter Kernel” (_not_ “Julia release channel”) as the kernel source:

 ![image](https://global.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/original/3X/c/2/c2633e8ad57672e94ede6b94c5927bc51d20bdcb.png)

A separate issue is that the front-end is trying to render the LaTeX version and failing.

The way the Jupyter protocol works is that the backend kernel (here, IJulia.jl) sends output as a dictionary in multiple formats, and the front-end chooses which one it wants to display. Here, IJulia sends text/plain, text/markdown, and text/latex formats for the documentation. The `jupyter notebook` is rendering the text/markdown format, but apparently VSCode is trying to render the text/latex format and failing. As noted above, you can force VSCode to use text/markdown via

```julia
display("text/markdown", Base.Docs.doc("replace"))

```

but this is a bit awkward. Another workaround is to tell Julia that `Markdown.MD` should never be displayed as text/latex:

```julia
import Markdown
Base.showable(::MIME"text/markdown", ::Markdown.MD) = false

```

at which point `?replace` works:

 ![image](https://global.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/original/3X/2/6/2691c8c205a2a366211dc5e39075928bcf0e2c49.png)

A longer-term “solution” would to patch IJulia.jl so that it never sends text/latex for `Markdown.MD` objects, but this is a bit annoying since the front-end is supposed to decide this.

The right thing would be for VSCode to fix this. They shouldn’t display as text/latex if text/markdown is available, since their text/latex display is apparently not fully functional. (However, their markdown rendering does not support LaTeX equations. So they really need to fix both.)

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