A Demonstration of ReStructuredText

Author: Jeff Rush <jeff@taupro.com>
Copyright: 2007 Tau Productions Inc.
License:Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0
Date: July 6, 2007
Version: 1
Series:5-Minutes with Python

A quick look at a style of marking up plaintext called "reStructuredText" with hotkeys from the Emacs text editor to view the result as HTML, PDF and slides.

Hello, my name is Jeff Rush and this is a quick demonstration of reStructuredText, a stylized way of marking up plaintext documents. reStructuredText was developed in the Python community and is used for whitepapers, embedded markup for program source and wiki pages, and to rapidly create slide presentations.

ReStructuredText documents can be mechanically converted into HTML pages, PDF documents and browser-accessible slide presentations. We'll take a look at each of these choices, all from the same document.

And Now a Demonstration...

Let's see it work!

  • use with emacs by rst.el macro package
    • colorize
    • hotkeys
      • XML C-c p x
      • HTML C-c p H
      • PDF C-c p q
      • S5 C-c p Q
  • sections -> title -> docinfo
  • mark section C-c p m
  • (demonstrate hotkeys to HTML, PDF)
  • (talk about DOM tree -> walk, transform, extract)
  • toc .. contents (double-colon)
  • toc C-c p i
  • emphasis
  • lists -> bullets, numbered
  • tables -> grid, simple
  • links
  • graphics .. image:: apple.png
  • substitutions .. |apple| .. image:: /home/caster/notes/presentations/demofiles/apple.png
  • talk more about slides, demo slide navigator
  • show one of my slide.txt files

Wrapup for Now

If reStructuredText looks like something you'd like to investigate further, visit this URL for the "docutils" Python package.

Thanks for listening and look for future talks about reStructuredText and how it can be integrated into your Python programs. It is a generally useful tool to add to your toolkit.

Docutils System Messages

System Message: ERROR/3 (data/a-demonstration-of-restructuredtext.txt, line 62); backlink

Undefined substitution referenced: "apple".