[Zope] Anybody working on docutils (ReStructuredText) stuff?

jlagarde@bigfoot.com jlagarde@bigfoot.com
Fri, 3 May 2002 12:06:12 -0700


Howdy,

I notice that the 0.1 version of docutils
(http://docutils.sourceforge.net) has been recently released. Tried it,
and it seems to do a pretty good job of rendering documents, even at
this early version number. Anybody currently working on using this
somewhere in Zope? 

I've been experimenting with backtalk recently, and although the
backtalk part is great, the structured text part just does not do a good
enough job for any serious document publishing IMO (see
http://docutils.sourceforge.net/spec/rst/problems.html for a much better
descriptions of the problems with STX than I could ever give). I had a
look at the sources of backtalk and docutils (I was already somewhat
familiar with the STX code), and the interfaces seem different enough
that a replacement of STX with docutils in backtalk seems nontrivial (to
me anyway). I guess that a simple docutilsDocument product should be
relatively straightforward though.

At this point I will probably still try to use the current version of
backtalk to do what I want, but it requires a lot of work on the
original docs to make them come out bearably OK looking. However, If
someone reveals that they're working on that stuff and may have
something out shortly, I might work on something else instead for a
while in the hope of using a docutils version later on.

BTW, thanks to Chris McDonough and other contributors for the current
version of backtalk, and to Richard Jones for pointing me to
ReStructuredText(now wrapped inside docutils), as I was working on
improving structured text myself at the time, clearly a futile effort
given the depth of thought that went into ReStructuredText.

Cheers,

Jean