[Stefan Merten]
* Is there a Emacs mode already?
[David Goodger]
Not yet. There are a few functions in tools/editors/emacs/restructuredtext.el, available from CVS or the snapshot (<http://docutils.sf.net/docutils-snapshot.tgz>).
[Stefan Merten]
Yes. This could and should be integrated with my work then.
Indeed. I think basing a custom mode on indented-text-mode would be a good place to begin. Although I hack elisp functions, I've never tackled a mode.
I coded a font-lock mode which recognizes most reST constructs.
It looks quite good! I hope you continue to develop it. Could it be made a derivative of indented-text-mode, so that it inherits that mode's behavior? Or is it already, except for keymaps? (How does one tell?) Or could this become a minor mode of indented-text-mode?
If you want to include it in an official CVS tree that's fine.
Thank you. I think I'll include it as tools/editors/emacs/rst-mode.el ("rst" not "rest", see below).
Please note that in the file I'm suggesting file name extensions ``.rest`` and ``.reST`` for reStructuredText documents. I don't know whether there is a widely accepted extension already. However, I think there should be one.
See the discussion at <http://docutils.sf.net/FAQ.html>, questions 2.3 & 2.4. I think .rst would be preferable to .rest, for length and to distinguish it from the other REST. Personally, I'll never use a .rst or .rest extension on files, only .txt, so the auto-mode-alist will not be useful to me. I may just set my default major mode to rst-mode in my .emacs file; it's now set to indented-text-mode.
* Are there writers for plain text and/or manual pages? ... Hmm... While thinking about it: It would suffice to have a writer for POD. This way you'll indirectly have a writer for manual pages for free.
The same is true of DocBook, since it can generate man pages. But either one means that an external tool is needed.
Finally I'd like to draw your attention to
http://template-toolkit.org/ [... and SDF ...] Sounds like "literate programming". Do you have a link to a description of how SDF accomplishes this rearranging?
This was solved fairly easy. The extractor (``sdfget``) used a table like this:: ...
Thanks for the explanation. Something similar to SDF or the template toolkit might be feasible with reStructuredText directives in a template file. It's worth exploring, and other literate programming systems may have ideas we can use. I'd like to see any resulting system be as simple and intuitive as possible, and be able to use all information already marked up explicitly or identified implicitly in the source (such as bibliographic fields such as "author"). -- David Goodger http://starship.python.net/~goodger Programmer/sysadmin for hire: http://starship.python.net/~goodger/cv