Comments on: reStructuredText for blog post formatting

By: eliben

eliben — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 18:15:46 +0000

Hi Jason, thanks for commenting!

I’m glad to hear that Textile has moved forward – it’s a real shame it was neglected for so long.

Personally, I’m very happy with reST now, and am using it for all my formatting needs.

By: Jason Samsa

Jason Samsa — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 01:20:20 +0000

Around the time of this post I took over the pytextile project. Since taking it over, I’ve completely rewritten a port of Textile 2.0 to Python and have built a lot of tests around the code. Some issues still exist but I think the current implementation (2.1.3) is much improved over past versions. It doesn’t have some of the non-textile features that existed in previous versions, but it does core textile much better.

It would be nice to allow pluggable extensions so that advanced users can customize pytextile easily. Perhaps that will be a feature I build this year.

By: Vasudev Ram

Vasudev Ram — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 00:31:42 +0000

Thanks, Eli. Did a quick check – looks fine now.
Will let you know if any other issues are found.

- Vasudev

By: eliben

eliben — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 15:13:17 +0000

Vasudev: yes, this is a limitation of those HTML text boxes, and I don’t know if I can do much about it. You can always copy-paste the whole code and view it comfortably in an outside editor if the scrolling becomes a real problem.

Update: I think I’ve managed to limit the height of the ‘pre’ boxes (using the max-height CSS property). I hope it works out nicely now.

By: Vasudev Ram

Vasudev Ram — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 10:35:48 +0000

Checked again after getting a message from Eli – there is a scroll bar at the bottom of the box, but missed seeing it, either due to a hurry or because it isn’t visible when you’re viewing the top or middle of the code (since the box is tall).

By: Vasudev Ram

Vasudev Ram — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 09:02:42 +0000

Interesting post, Eli.

Coincidentally, I had been thinking about the same issue – generating content for blog posts from some form of structured text such as Textile or Markdown – just a little while before I read this post. Though I knew about reST (reStructuredText), for some reason I hadn’t remembered that option – so its good that I read your post …

With my PC config, I see an issue with the output you got – i.e. this current post:

The code shown is truncated on the right side. I tried resizing the text (using Firefox) with Ctrl-plus and Ctrl-minus, to different sizes, but the problem stays.

The text (English) content of the post shows fine, though.

- Vasudev

By: eliben

eliben — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 17:18:09 +0000

John: Indeed, it seems that publishing only the body fragment without the programmatic interface is impossible.

I don’t have PyPi experience, but from what I’ve seen the author of reST is very responsive, and you should definitely tell him the idea you have. He’ll probably add it as a command line option to the published script.

Valentin: I don’t like WYSIWYGs They’re all good and nice while they serve your need. But once there’s something you can’t do with them, that’s it, you’re done. For example, I found no normal way to conveniently post source code and footnotes with Wordpress’s WYSIWYG.

By: Valentin Jacquemin

Valentin Jacquemin — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 12:04:19 +0000

Hello Eli,
I was just wondering… Why do you get tired by writing your posts in HTML since Wordpress has a great wysiwyg?

By: John

John — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 20:48:06 +0000

Edit: Sorry, don’t want to sound harsh or rude, I just don’t like to see a good markup format not be widely-used because people can’t easily use it.

Edit #2: Also, it looks like the Cheeseshop is now instead called the “python package index”, or just “package index” for short.

By: John

John — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 20:34:08 +0000

I like reST, and I think — formatting-wise — it’s a good alternative to Markdown. The reason reST is not more widely-used is because there’s no easy way for non-technical users to just have a script that turns a reST-formatted document into an html fragment.

Markdown has this. It’s just the Markdown.pl script from daringfireball. You download it and run it. Pass it a filename and out of stdout comes plain html (but no html or head tags, nor CSS — just an html fragment).

Someone needs to write and distribute (via the Cheeseshop, please) a simple rst2htmlfrag.py script that does what Markdown.pl does (but for reST).

Incidentally, no, I have no idea why the bundled rst2html.py tool does not feature an “–html-fragment-only” option. (Or, if it has such an option, I’m not seeing it in the online help.)

And, please, don’t tell me it’s trivial to write such a script. I realize it’s trivial for someone who knows a little bit of python and who’s willing to dig around the docutils docs. Maybe it’s so darn trivial that no one thinks they need to do it and so very few users consider using reST when comparing it to Markdown, Textile, asciidoc, etc.

Eli, maybe this would be a good exercise for you if you’ve never packaged and uploaded to the cheeseshop.