[reportlab-users] Idea by Dinu Gherman: using rst2pdf as a way to create flowables

[Dinu Gherman]

Andy Robinson:


> Within ReportLab we haven't looked at rst internals, although we're starting to use it in our 'new world'.  I would love to adopt it for writing more documentation, as the source for our own manuals is really painful to edit.  But we have to have full control over the styles, headings, linking and so on.  This probably shows the way forward.  


RST (or also ReST) is definitely worth having multiple looks, especially since it has become a de-facto standard in the Python ecosphere via Sphinx (also widely used outside), which itself is a much more agile project on top of Docutils which moves ahead pretty slowly, though.

I was playing around with a combination of reportlab and docutils before, also for a tiny toy project, quiz cards:

https://bitbucket.org/deeplook/quizcards

It still uses ReST containers for questions and answers of one card, but these should rather be replaced with normal headlines so normal renderers know how to display them without raising an eyebrow at the containers (and ignoring them).

That showed me how helpful a mapping from ReST to a Platypus story would be, rather than one to a final PDF. Later I figured out that rst2pdf might have done this entirely already. And it did, kind of, although it seems to have a couple of quirks as with the headlines, but maybe Roberto will squeeze them out. 

I think a mapping from ReST to a list of story with only reportlab flowables would be very useful, even if that would be only a subset of what ReST allows one to do (like, I guess, tables insides list items, etc.).

Regards,

Dinu