# Docutils Link List

Author: | Lea Wiemann
Contact: | docutils-develop@lists.sourceforge.net
Revision: | 7688
Date: | 2013-07-15
Copyright: | This document has been placed in the public domain.

Contents

- Editors
- Export
  - PDF
  - OpenOffice
  - HTML variants
  - Others
- Import
- Extensions
- Related Applications
  - Development
  - CMS Systems
  - Presentations

This document contains links users of Docutils and reStructuredText may find useful. Many of the project listed here are hosted in the Docutils Sandbox. If you have something to publish, you can get write access, too!

The most current version of this link list can always be found at http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/user/links.html.

# Editors

Advanced text editors with reStructuredText support, IDEs, and docutils GUIs:

- Emacs rst mode.
- Vim:
  - reStructuredText syntax highlighting mode,
  - VST (Vim reStructuredText) plugin for Vim7 with folding.
  - VOoM plugin for Vim that emulates two-pane outliner with support for reStructuredText (since version 4.0b2).
- JED programmers editor with rst mode
- reStructuredText editor plug-in for Eclipse
- Gunnar Schwant's DocFactory is a wxPython GUI application for Docutils.
- ReSTedit by Bill Bumgarner is a Docutils GUI for Mac OS X.
- Leo is an outliner, written in Python using PyQt. It can be used as IDE for literal programming, as a filing cabinet holding any kind of data and as document editor with outlines containing reStructuredText markup.
- NoTex is a browser based reStructuredText editor with syntax highlighting and PDF/HTML export functionality using Sphinx.

# Export

Convert reStructuredText to other formats:

## PDF

- rst2pdf (reportlab) is a tool to go directly from reStructuredText to PDF, via reportlab. No LaTeX installation is required.
- rst2pdf (pdflatex) by Martin Blais is a minimal front end producing LaTeX, compiling the LaTeX file, getting the produced output to the destination location and finally deleting all the messy temporary files that this process generates.
- rst2pdf (rubber) is a front end for the generation of PDF documents from a reStructuredText source via LaTeX in one step cleaning up intermediate files. It uses the rubber Python wrapper for LaTeX and friends.
- py.rest from the Codespeak py Lib scripts converts reStructuredText files to HTML and PDF (cleaning up the intermediate latex files). Similar to `buildhtml.py`, it looks recursively for .txt files in the given PATHS.

## OpenOffice

- odtwriter the Open Document Format writer developed by Dave Kuhlman produces files that can be processed with OpenOffice and Abiword. Since version 0.5, the odtwriter it is part of the Docutils core.

## HTML variants

- The Sphinx Python Documentation Generator by Georg Brandl was originally created to translate the Python documentation, and is now used by a wide choice of projects.

  It can generate complete web sites (interlinked and indexed HTML pages) and/or PDF from a set of rst source files.

- rst2ht by Oliver Rutherfurd, converts reStructuredText to an .ht template, for use with ht2html.

- htmlnav by Gunnar Schwant, is an HTML writer which supports navigation bars.

- rest2web, by Michael Foord, is a tool for creating web sites with reStructuredText.

- rst2chm by Oliver Rutherfurd, generates Microsoft HTML Help files from reStructuredText files.

- html4strict produces XHTML that strictly conforms to the XHTML 1.0 specification.

- html4trans produces XHTML conforming to the version 1.0 Transitional DTD that contains enough formatting information to be viewed by a lightweight HTML browser without CSS support.

- A simple HTML writer by Bill Bumgarner that doesn't rely on CSS (stylesheets).

## Others

- Pandoc is a document converter that can write Markdown, reStructuredText, HTML, LaTeX, RTF, DocBook XML, and S5.
- restxsl by Michael Alyn Miller, lets you transform reStructuredText documents into XML/XHTML files using XSLT stylesheets.
- An XSLT script by Ladislav Lhotka enables reStructuredText annotations to be included in RELAG NG XML schemas.
- DocBook Writer by Oliver Rutherfurd.
- Nabu, written by Martin Blais, is a publishing system which extracts information from reStructuredText documents and stores it in a database. Python knowledge is required to write extractor functions (see Writing an Extractor) and to retrieve the data from the database again.
- The pickle writer by Martin Blais pickles the document tree to a binary string. Later unpickling will allow you to publish with other Writers.
- The Texinfo Writer, by Jon Waltman converts reStructuredText to Texinfo, the documentation format used by the GNU project and the Emacs text editor. Texinfo can be used to produce multiple output formats, including HTML, PDF, and Info.
- For confluence CMS see https://github.com/netresearch/rst2confluence.
- Deploying into wikis might be aided by deploy-rst.

# Import

Convert other formats to reStructuredText:

- sxw2rest, by Trent W. Buck, converts StarOffice XML Writer (SXW) files to reStructuredText.
- xml2rst, an XSLT stylesheet written by Stefan Merten, converts XML dumps of the document tree (e.g. created with rst2xml.py) back to reStructuredText.
- xhtml2rest, written by Antonios Christofides, is a simple utility to convert XHTML to reStructuredText.
- Sphinx includes a LaTeX to Rst converter in its source code (trimmed to importing the old Python docs).
- Pandoc can read Markdown and (subsets of) HTML, and LaTeX and export to (amongst others) reStructuredText.
- PySource, by Tony Ibbs, is an experimental Python source Reader. There is some related code in David Goodger's sandbox (pysource_reader) and a Python Source Reader document.

# Extensions

Extend the reStructuredText syntax or the features of Docutils. More extensions are in the Docutils Sandbox.

- Jens J. Mortensen developed LaTeX math for reST, which writes to LaTeX or to MathML. It's included with Docutils since 0.8 (2010-11-05).
- Beni Cherniavsky has written a generic preprocessing module for roles and/or directives and built preprocessors for TeX math for both LaTeX and HTML output on top of it.
- Beni Cherniavsky maintains a Makefile for driving Docutils, hoping to handle everything one might do with Docutils.
- The ASCII art to SVG converter (aafigure) developed by Chris Liechti can parse ASCII art images, embedded in reST documents and output an image. This would mean that simple illustrations could be embedded as ASCII art in the reST source and still look nice when converted to e.g. HTML
- zot4rst by Erik Hetzner is an extension that allows users to write reST documents using citations from a Zotero library.
- Quick and easy publishing reStructuredText source files as blog posts on blogger.com is possible with rst2blogger .

# Related Applications

Applications using docutils/reStructuredText and helper applications.

- For Wikis, please see the FAQ entry about Wikis.
- For Blogs (Weblogs), please see the FAQ entry about Blogs.

## Development

- Sphinx extends the ReStructuredText syntax to better support the documentation of Software (and other) projects (but other documents can be written with it too).

  Since version 2.6, the Python documentation is based on reStructuredText and Sphinx.

- Trac, a project management and bug/issue tracking system, supports using reStructuredText as an alternative to wiki markup.

- PyLit provides a bidirectional text <--> code converter for literate programming with reStructuredText.

- If you are developing a Qt app, rst2qhc lets you generate the whole help automatically from reStructuredText. That includes keywords, TOC, multiple manuals per project, filters, project file, collection project file, and more.

## CMS Systems

- Plone and Zope both support reStructuredText markup.
- ZReST, by Richard Jones, is a "ReStructuredText Document for Zope" application that is complete and ready to install.

## Presentations

- native support for S5;
- The PythonPoint interface by Richard Jones produces PDF presentations using ReportLabs' PythonPoint.
- InkSlide quick and easy presentations using Inkscape. InkSlide uses reStructuredText for markup, although it renders only a subset of rst.