Thursday, April 23, 2009

the expanding reStructuredTextiverse

It seems I'm always coming across new uses for reStructuredText, the plaintext format that goes everywhere. (Really, more of a "set of plaintext conventions" than a format as such.) I'm beginning to imagine a talk reviewing them all for next Fall's Ohio LinuxFest, or maybe a magazine article.

The places you can go with reStructuredText - am I missing any? (I haven't checked these all for viability)Not everything has been done yet, however. Here are a couple projects yet undone - so far as I know. Comment with your own ideas... or take this as a challenge and implement something!
  • rst2word - this would really be the holy grail, for communicating to the unwashed masses. (We in the know can use rst2odt and convert within OpenOffice, but rst2word would get my boss on board.)
  • Fuse more templating engines to rst (perhaps not a good idea, violate the readability principle?)
  • ReST lexer for Scintilla - this would allow ReST support in WingIDE, too.
[EDIT: Thanks Michael Foord for info about rest2web, rst2pdf.]

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hmm, would rst2rtf be enough to get rst2word's benefits? Converting to/from Word is asking for 99% of the pain for a dubious gain. Have seen too many other people (smarter than me) attempt conversions to/from Word. It was days of trial-and-error solutions that apply only to specific versions of Word and even then would break in non-obviously-obscure cases.

I completely get the desire to have such a conversion... :)

Anonymous said...

rst2rtf might be a more achievable option thatn rst2word and would still be quite usable in Word.