reStructuredText Standard Definition Files

Author:: David Goodger
Contact:: docutils-develop@lists.sourceforge.net
Revision:: $Revision$
Date:: $Date$
Copyright:: This document has been placed in the public domain.

This document describes standard definition files, such as sets of substitution definitions and interpreted text roles, that can be included in reStructuredText documents. The "include" directive has a special syntax for these standard definition files, angle brackets around the file name:

.. include:: <filename.txt>

The individual data files are stored with the Docutils source code in the "docutils" package, in the docutils/parsers/rst/include directory.

Substitution Definitions

Many of the standard definition files contain sets of substitution definitions, which can be used in documents via substitution references. For example, the copyright symbol is defined in isonum.txt as "copy":

.. include:: <isonum.txt>

Copyright |copy| 2003 by John Q. Public, all rights reserved.

Individual substitution definitions can also be copied from definition files and pasted into documents. This has two advantages: it removes dependencies, and it saves processing of unused definitions. However, multiple substitution definitions add clutter to the document.

Substitution references require separation from the surrounding text with whitespace or punctuation. To use a substitution without intervening whitespace, you can use the disappearing-whitespace escape sequence, backslash-space:

.. include:: <isonum.txt>

Copyright |copy| 2003, BogusMegaCorp\ |trade|.

Custom substitution definitions may use the "unicode" directive. Whitespace is ignored and removed, effectively sqeezing together the text:

.. |copy|   unicode:: U+000A9 .. COPYRIGHT SIGN
.. |BogusMegaCorp (TM)| unicode:: BogusMegaCorp U+2122
   .. with trademark sign

Copyright |copy| 2003, |BogusMegaCorp (TM)|.

In addition, the "ltrim", "rtrim", and "trim" options may be used with the "unicode" directive to automatically trim spaces from the left, right, or both sides (respectively) of substitution references:

.. |---| unicode:: U+02014 .. em dash
   :trim:

Character Entity Sets

The following files contain substitution definitions corresponding to XML character entity sets, from the following standards: ISO 8879 & ISO 9573-13 (combined), MathML, and XHTML1. They were generated by the tools/dev/unicode2rstsubs.py program from the input file unicode.xml, which is maintained as part of the MathML 2 Recommentation XML source.

Entity Set File	Description
isoamsa.txt	Added Mathematical Symbols: Arrows
isoamsb.txt	Added Mathematical Symbols: Binary Operators
isoamsc.txt	Added Mathematical Symbols: Delimiters
isoamsn.txt	Added Mathematical Symbols: Negated Relations
isoamso.txt	Added Mathematical Symbols: Ordinary
isoamsr.txt	Added Mathematical Symbols: Relations
isobox.txt	Box and Line Drawing
isocyr1.txt	Russian Cyrillic
isocyr2.txt	Non-Russian Cyrillic
isodia.txt	Diacritical Marks
isogrk1.txt	Greek Letters
isogrk2.txt	Monotoniko Greek
isogrk3.txt	Greek Symbols
isogrk4.txt [1]	Alternative Greek Symbols
isolat1.txt	Added Latin 1
isolat2.txt	Added Latin 2
isomfrk.txt [1]	Mathematical Fraktur
isomopf.txt [1]	Mathematical Openface (Double-struck)
isomscr.txt [1]	Mathematical Script
isonum.txt	Numeric and Special Graphic
isopub.txt	Publishing
isotech.txt	General Technical
mmlalias.txt	MathML aliases for entities from other sets
mmlextra.txt [1]	Extra names added by MathML
xhtml1-lat1.txt	XHTML Latin 1
xhtml1-special.txt	XHTML Special Characters
xhtml1-symbol.txt	XHTML Mathematical, Greek and Symbolic Characters

For example, the copyright symbol is defined as the XML character entity ©. The equivalent reStructuredText substitution reference (defined in both isonum.txt and xhtml1-lat1.txt) is |copy|.

S5/HTML Definitions

The "s5defs.txt" standard definition file contains interpreted text roles (classes) and other definitions for documents destined to become S5/HTML slide shows.