reStructuredText is cool

A few weeks ago I blogged about what digital format to use for a journal that would eventually be printed at some indefinite point in the future. I was deliberating between odt and html. OpenOffice gave me essentially what I wanted, but I thought using a text file instead of a binary file might help out since I'm going to be adding lots of pictures (would rather have a pointer to them than embed them), and I can also do a diff of a text file. Well a kind reader recommended I look into reStructuredText and I'm glad he reminded me of it. (I've been meaning to check it out). I should add that I was thinking about using wiki markup as well (I would say wiki is to html what python is to java). But I think rst is actually a very good match for me. Here's what I like about rst:

• I can edit in any text editor
• The markup is really simple. Here's a template I made for myself:

  Jan 22, 2006
  -------------
  
  Paragraph number 1.
  
  Paragraph number 2.
  
  .. figure:: /path/to/picture
     :width: 600
  
     Caption for picture
  

  (The really nice thing here is the figure markup. It adds a bunch of div tags around the image and the caption, so if I want to do anything fancy with css it would be simple. I don't know how easy this is in wiki...).
• I can open/import it in OpenOffice after I convert it to html (which consists of doing the following: rst2html.py journal.rst > test.html
• I can export as tex if I feel the desire
• I can spell check in emacs
• The file size of my journal will stay relatively small. (I'm keeping backups of my pictures as well and the links should be easy to replace, since I have a straightforward numbering scheme for storing digital pics on my computer)
• I can use it for creating an s5 slideshow for pycon...

Downsides? Well, I have to postprocess the file, before being able to preview in html.... Oh well, I like it so far.

tags: odt  python  rst  restructuredtext  

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