Wolfram Language & System Documentation Center

Low-Level Notebook Structure

Like everything else in the Wolfram Language, notebooks are ultimately symbolic expressions. When you edit notebooks—or apply high-level programmatic functions—the Wolfram Language automatically updates these expressions. But if you look at the lowest level—say by opening a notebook file as text—you will see the underlying expressions, in which formatting constructs are represented as a hierarchy of low-level symbolic "boxes".

— toggle between formatted display and underlying symbolic expression

Notebook — low-level symbolic representation for a notebook

Cell — low-level representation for a cell in a notebook

CellGroupData — low-level representation for a cell group in a notebook

BoxData — low-level representation of the contents of a typesetting cell

TextData ▪ RawData ▪ StyleData

RowBox — low-level representation for a row of arbitrary elements

GridBox — low-level representation of an arbitrary 2D layout

SuperscriptBox ▪ SubscriptBox ▪ SubsuperscriptBox

OverscriptBox ▪ UnderscriptBox ▪ UnderoverscriptBox

FractionBox ▪ SqrtBox ▪ RadicalBox

StyleBox — low-level wrapper specifying styles and style options to apply