RstCloth¶
Background and Goals¶
reStructuredText is a powerful human-centric markup language that is well defined, flexible, with powerful tools that make writing and maintaining text easy and pleasurable. Humans can edit reStructuredText without the aide of complex editing tools, and the resulting source is easy to manipulate and process.
One of the key features of reStructuredText is it’s relatively complete extension API, which makes it possible to minimize fragile repetitive structures in source files and increase the ease of production. While you can use these extensions to build custom content types with ease, extensions make reStructuredText source less portable and less intuitive to edit for casual contributors.
As an alternative and a supplement, RstCloth is a Python API for writing well formed reStructuredText programatically. RstCloth facilitates :
generating data-driven content views into existing reStructuredText environments and tools.
automating content generation and modification without creating unportable-restructured text.
ensuring that the tool chain is easily debugable by using transparent intermediate formats.
Status¶
RstCloth is undergoing ongoing development and expansion is not stable at this point. Current features and projects include:
improve documentation.
develop unit testing framework to ensure consistent API behavior.
build/extend a table generation API.
Add a chart generation API for
sphinx-charts.improve paragraph level content generation API.