Python uses restructured text mark-up a lot in the code documentation. It’s a lightweight (read: easy to type) mark-up for formatting your technical documentation. There is a special twist: reST is very readable in plain-text source code format too. This make it very suitable for source code comments based API document generation.

Sphinx documentation suite uses restructured text internally and pypi.python.org package descriptions are writtein in reST.

Here is a very good on-line service by Andrey Rublev which allows you to type in restructured text and see the results in real-time. For example, I prepare many blog posts offline, convert them to HTML with rst.ninjs.org and then paste them to WordPress HTML source view.

The service source code is available on GitHub.

(note: HTML link syntax in reST is horrible – could we create something smarter for this as this is one of the most often used feature?)

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