swcarpentry/bc — pull request #163 by gvwilson (2013-11-22 15:36:51+00:00)
Title: Trying to teach nbconvert to make pages from our notebooks, but tripping over Unicode characters

The Makefile is trying to do the right thing, but characters like `×` in the HTML get converted to u'\xd7', which then produce the stack trace below. If anyone knows the magic words, please let me know. (Storing the `×` character directly in the notebook doesn't work either.)

```
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/Users/gwilson/anaconda/bin/ipython", line 6, in
sys.exit(start_ipython())
File "/Users/gwilson/anaconda/lib/python2.7/site-packages/IPython/__init__.py", line 118, in start_ipython
return launch_new_instance(argv=argv, **kwargs)
File "/Users/gwilson/anaconda/lib/python2.7/site-packages/IPython/config/application.py", line 539, in launch_instance
app.start()
File "/Users/gwilson/anaconda/lib/python2.7/site-packages/IPython/terminal/ipapp.py", line 356, in start
return self.subapp.start()
File "/Users/gwilson/anaconda/lib/python2.7/site-packages/IPython/nbconvert/nbconvertapp.py", line 266, in start
self.convert_notebooks()
File "/Users/gwilson/anaconda/lib/python2.7/site-packages/IPython/nbconvert/nbconvertapp.py", line 305, in convert_notebooks
write_resultes = self.writer.write(output, resources, notebook_name=notebook_name)
File "/Users/gwilson/anaconda/lib/python2.7/site-packages/IPython/nbconvert/writers/stdout.py", line 34, in write
print(output)
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xd7' in position 212734: ordinal not in range(128)
```