reStructuredText notes (.rst file extension)
Posted by jpluimers on 2016/04/28
Thanks to Eric Grange who asked Which lightweight markup language? I learned about reStructuredText (no cap R!) from a few comments Joseph Mitzen made.
It looks like reStructuredText has been around for much longer than Markdown, has better features (#1 for me: it is unambiguous, #2: native support on GitHub), but isn’t as popular. I think the latter is because finding editors supporting a live preview for it is a bit hard and tools are scattered around the net.
So here are a few notes on how I got reStructuredText to work on my Mac using OS X.
- GitHub open sourced Atom which can edit a lot of text formats including reStructuredText
- There is a Mac download for Atom
- Atom requires brew
- A reStructuredText pandoc preview for Atom requires Pandoc (it works, but rst preview doesn’t)
- It also requires language-restructuredtext (which is convenient anyway as it adds reStructuredText syntax highlighting to Atom)
- Pandoc is an almost universal converter between various file formats (input/output including reStructuredText, Markdown, LaTeX, docx, html, docbook, epub, etc. PDF output requires LaTeX)
- LaTeX is a high quality typesetting system based on TeX by Donald Knuth.
- For later: Using Sphinx to Write Technical Books – Pedro Kroger.
The hardest part was getting the reStructuredText preview for Atom to work:
- Verify you have recent apm/npm
- Download, then install the latest Mac Pandoc release (filename like “pandoc-*-osx.pkg”).
- Open Atom
- Menu “Atom” -> “Preferences” to open a “Settings” tab in the Atom user interface
- In the list “Settings”, “Keybindings”, “Packages”, “Themes”, “Updates”, “Install”, choose the last one: “Install”
- In the “Search packages” textbox, type “language-restructuredtext”, then hit Enter
- Wait a few seconds until “language-restructuredtext” appears in the list, then click the “Install” button next to it
- In the “Search packages” textbox, type “rst-preview-pandoc”, then hit Enter
- Wait a few seconds until “rst-preview-pandoc” appears in the list, then click the “Install” button next to it
- To enable spell checking:
- In “Settings”, go to “Packages”
- Search for “spell-check”
- Click “settings”
- Add “gfm.restructuredtext” to the “Grammars” list
- Note you get “gfm.restructuredtext” from the “language-restructuredtext” package as described in Spell check in Atom – Atom quick tip #3 – Atom Editor Tips and Tricks.
- Restart Atom from the command-line (otherwise it will not find pandoc *)
- Open a reStructuredText file
- Press Ctrl-Shift-e to show the preview
- pandoc error:
The error you get when pandoc cannot be found is this one:
It is easy to solve by modifying the Atom startup shell script and then don’t start Atom.app, but start atom from the command-line in a terminal window:
atom
For Windows:
- Install Chocolatey Gallery.
- Follow the steps at Hello Windows.
- Fails horribly: “The term ‘Install-ChocolateyPackage’ is not recognized as the name of a cmdlet”.
A later try to get Pandoc installed on Windows was much easier: there is a Pandoc for Windows installer now.
Settings changes
I made a few, for instance:
- Ensure Tab to expands to spaces: See Soft Tabs and Tab Length under Settings > Editor Settings. via github – Atom – Change indentation mode – Stack Overflow.
Tables
Tables are always a hard thing in any markup. Luckily truben.no/table/ has a good table editor (it’s the same as table-editor.com) and can emit reStructuredText, Markdown, HTML and other formats.
More in the future
Give me some time, and I will post more about using the format and how it compares to my Markdown past.
Note that pandoc does not fully support reStructuredText (for instance not all table features are supported), but docutils rst2html.py does and also gives better warning/error information when parsing.
Here are some links about the reStructured syntax and how they can be rendered by rst2html.py:
- A ReStructuredText Primer.
- reStructuredText Test Document: examples of Syntax Constructs.
- The reStructuredText Cheat Sheet: Syntax Reminders.
- Quick reStructuredText.
- Pandoc Markdown and ReST Compared.
For now, I’ll end with the goals of reStructuredText which I really like:
Goals
The primary goal of reStructuredText is to define a markup syntax for
use in Python docstrings and other documentation domains, that is
readable and simple, yet powerful enough for non-trivial use. The
intended purpose of the reStructuredText markup is twofold:
- the establishment of a set of standard conventions allowing the
expression of structure within plaintext, and- the conversion of such documents into useful structured data
formats.The secondary goal of reStructuredText is to be accepted by the Python
community (by way of being blessed by PythonLabs and the BDFL [1]) as
a standard for Python inline documentation (possibly one of several
standards, to account for taste).
[1] Python’s creator and “Benevolent Dictator For Life”,
Guido van Rossum.To clarify the primary goal, here are specific design goals, in order,
beginning with the most important:
- Readable. The marked-up text must be easy to read without any
prior knowledge of the markup language. It should be as easily
read in raw form as in processed form.- Unobtrusive. The markup that is used should be as simple and
unobtrusive as possible. The simplicity of markup constructs
should be roughly proportional to their frequency of use. The most
common constructs, with natural and obvious markup, should be the
simplest and most unobtrusive. Less common constructs, for which
there is no natural or obvious markup, should be distinctive.- Unambiguous. The rules for markup must not be open for
interpretation. For any given input, there should be one and only
one possible output (including error output).- Unsurprising. Markup constructs should not cause unexpected output
upon processing. As a fallback, there must be a way to prevent
unwanted markup processing when a markup construct is used in a
non-markup context (for example, when documenting the markup syntax
itself).- Intuitive. Markup should be as obvious and easily remembered as
possible, for the author as well as for the reader. Constructs
should take their cues from such naturally occurring sources as
plaintext email messages, newsgroup postings, and text
documentation such as README.txt files.- Easy. It should be easy to mark up text using any ordinary text
editor.- Scalable. The markup should be applicable regardless of the length
of the text.- Powerful. The markup should provide enough constructs to produce a
reasonably rich structured document.- Language-neutral. The markup should apply to multiple natural (as
well as artificial) languages, not only English.- Extensible. The markup should provide a simple syntax and
interface for adding more complex general markup, and custom
markup.- Output-format-neutral. The markup will be appropriate for
processing to multiple output formats, and will not be biased
toward any particular format.The design goals above were used as criteria for accepting or
rejecting syntax, or selecting between alternatives.It is emphatically not the goal of reStructuredText to define
docstring semantics, such as docstring contents or docstring length.
These issues are orthogonal to the markup syntax and beyond the scope
of this specification.Also, it is not the goal of reStructuredText to maintain compatibility
with StructuredText or Setext. reStructuredText shamelessly steals
their great ideas and ignores the not-so-great.Author’s note:
Due to the nature of the problem we’re trying to solve (or,
perhaps, due to the nature of the proposed solution), the above
goals unavoidably conflict. I have tried to extract and distill
the wisdom accumulated over the years in the Python Doc-SIG
mailing list and elsewhere, to come up with a coherent and
consistent set of syntax rules, and the above goals by which to
measure them.There will inevitably be people who disagree with my particular
choices. Some desire finer control over their markup, others
prefer less. Some are concerned with very short docstrings,
others with full-length documents. This specification is an
effort to provide a reasonably rich set of markup constructs in a
reasonably simple form, that should satisfy a reasonably large
group of reasonable people.David Goodger (goodger@python.org), 2001-04-20
–jeroen
via: reStructuredText tool support – Stack Overflow.
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