Docutils Link List

This document contains links that users of Docutils and reStructuredText may find useful.

The most current version of this link list can always be found at https://docutils.sourceforge.io/docs/user/links.html. If you find outdated or broken links or want to suggest additions, please let us know and we'll update the list here.

Editors

Advanced text editors with reStructuredText support, IDEs, and docutils GUIs:

Emacs rst mode.
Vim:
- reStructuredText syntax highlighting mode,
- VST (Vim reStructuredText) plugin for Vim7 with folding.
- VOoM plugin for Vim that emulates two-pane outliner with support for reStructuredText (since version 4.0b2).
- Riv: Take notes in rST Vim plugin to take notes in reStructured text.
reStructuredText Language Support for Visual Studio Code
reStructuredText editor plug-in for Eclipse
JED programmers editor with rst mode
Gnome's gedit offers syntax highlighting and a reST preview pane.

Latest version of the plugin is available from bittner @ github (See also: Gedit third party plugins).
Gunnar Schwant's DocFactory is a wxPython GUI application for Docutils.
ReSTedit by Bill Bumgarner is a Docutils GUI for Mac OS X.
ReText is a simple but powerful editor for Markdown and reStructuredText markup languages. It is written in Python using PyQt libraries.
Leo is an outliner, written in Python using PyQt. It can be used as IDE for literal programming, as a filing cabinet holding any kind of data and as document editor with outlines containing reStructuredText markup.
NoTex is a browser-based reStructuredText editor with syntax highlighting and PDF/HTML export functionality using Sphinx.
rsted is a "simple online editor for reStructuredText on Flask". You can try it on http://rst.ninjs.org/

Projects providing additional export routes.

rst2pdf (reportlab) is a tool to go directly from reStructuredText to PDF, via ReportLab. No LaTeX installation is required.
rst2pdf (pdflatex) by Martin Blais is a minimal front end producing LaTeX, compiling the LaTeX file, getting the produced output to the destination location and finally deleting all the messy temporary files that this process generates.
rst2pdf (rubber) is a front end for the generation of PDF documents from a reStructuredText source via LaTeX in one step cleaning up intermediate files. It uses the rubber Python wrapper for LaTeX and friends.
rlpdf is another PDF Writer based on ReportLabs.
RinohType is a pure Python PDF Writer based on a document template and a style sheet (beta).

The Sphinx Python Documentation Generator by Georg Brandl was originally created to translate the Python documentation. In the meantime, there is a wide range of Projects using Sphinx

It can generate complete web sites (interlinked and indexed HTML pages), ePub, LaTeX, and others from a set of rST source files.
The Nikola static site generator, uses reStructuredText by default.
Pelican is a static site generator (mainly for blogs). Articles/pages can be written in reStructuredText or Markdown format.
tinkerer is a static bloggin framework based on Sphinx.
htmlnav by Gunnar Schwant, is an HTML writer which supports navigation bars.
rest2web, by Michael Foord, is a tool for creating web sites with reStructuredText. Development stalled, there is a fork at https://gitlab.com/wavexx/rest2web
html4trans produces XHTML conforming to the version 1.0 Transitional DTD that contains enough formatting information to be viewed by a lightweight HTML browser without CSS support.
A simple HTML writer by Bill Bumgarner that doesn't rely on CSS stylesheets.

rst2epub2 by Matt Harrison includes the epublib (originally by Tim Tambin) and a rst2epub.py executable for the conversion.
Sphinx provides ePub as output option, too.

Pandoc is a document converter that can write Markdown, reStructuredText, HTML, LaTeX, RTF, DocBook XML, and S5.
restxsl by Michael Alyn Miller, lets you transform reStructuredText documents into XML/XHTML files using XSLT stylesheets.
An XSLT script by Ladislav Lhotka enables reStructuredText annotations to be included in RELAG NG XML schemas.
DocBook Writer by Oliver Rutherfurd.
Nabu, written by Martin Blais, is a publishing system which extracts information from reStructuredText documents and stores it in a database. Python knowledge is required to write extractor functions and to retrieve the data from the database again.
The pickle writer by Martin Blais pickles the document tree to a binary string. Later unpickling will allow you to publish with other Writers.
The Texinfo Writer, by Jon Waltman converts reStructuredText to Texinfo, the documentation format used by the GNU project and the Emacs text editor. Texinfo can be used to produce multiple output formats, including HTML, PDF, and Info.
For confluence CMS see https://github.com/netresearch/rst2confluence.
Deploying into wikis might be aided by deploy-rst.

Convert other formats to reStructuredText:

recommonmark is a Markdown (CommonMark) parser for docutils originally created by Luca Barbato.

Docutils "markdown" parser (new in Docutils 0.17) is a wrapper around recommonmark.
sxw2rest, by Trent W. Buck, converts StarOffice XML Writer (SXW) files to reStructuredText. (link down)
xml2rst, an XSLT stylesheet written by Stefan Merten, converts XML dumps of the document tree (e.g. created with rst2xml) back to reStructuredText.
xhtml2rest, written by Antonios Christofides, is a simple utility to convert XHTML to reStructuredText.
DashTable by Gustav Klopp converts HTML tables into reStructuredText. Colspan and Rowspan supported!
Sphinx includes a LaTeX to rST converter in its source code (trimmed to importing the old Python docs).
Pandoc can read Markdown and (subsets of) HTML, and LaTeX and export to (amongst others) reStructuredText.
PySource, by Tony Ibbs, is an experimental Python source Reader. There is some related code in David Goodger's sandbox (pysource_reader) and a Python Source Reader document.

Extend the reStructuredText syntax or the features of Docutils. More extensions are in the Docutils Sandbox.

Beni Cherniavsky has written a generic preprocessing module for roles and/or directives and built preprocessors for TeX math for both LaTeX and HTML output on top of it.
Beni Cherniavsky maintains a Makefile for driving Docutils, hoping to handle everything one might do with Docutils.
The ASCII art to SVG converter (aafigure) developed by Chris Liechti can parse ASCII art images, embedded in reST documents and output an image. This would mean that simple illustrations could be embedded as ASCII art in the reST source and still look nice when converted to e.g. HTML
Quick and easy publishing reStructuredText source files as blog posts on blogger.com is possible with rst2blogger .