ReST experience

I’ve been playing with Restructured Text for a bit, and it was a very pleasant experience, unlike latex. ReST has a nice readable source, and the source file itself is very suited for distribution. When needed you can convert it to HTML and latex. ReST is very suited for HTML, and as it is one of the most prominent standards this day, I see this as a good thing.

This does not mean that it cannot be used for printing, the HTML it generates is very suited for printing, but if you want a more “professional” layout you can easily convert it to tex.

ReST has many advantages over tex of you’re writing normal documentation (like most texts) without any mathematical markup. The code to make a ReST document is easy, clean and easily comprehensible. Layout options are plenty, not too much, not too many. I will doubt that I will run into a limitation soon. The only thing it misses is a table of contents generator, but that can be solved by using tex. It even has a table of contents generator, which automaticly makes links inside the document.

I see ReST as a nice alternative to tex, or at least a better beginning for writing pieces of text.