A reStructuredText primer

reStructuredText is also called reST (refer to http://docutils.sourceforge.net/rst.html). It is a plain text markup language widely used in the Python community to document packages. The great thing about reST is that the text is still readable since the markup syntax does not obfuscate the text like LaTeX would.

Here's a sample of such a document:

=====
Title
=====


Section 1
=========
This *word* has emphasis.


Section 2
=========


Subsection
::::::::::

Text.

reST comes in docutils, a package that provides a suite of scripts to transform a reST file to various formats, such as HTML, LaTeX, XML, or even S5, Eric Meyer's slide show system (refer to http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5).

Writers can focus on the content and then decide how to render it, depending on the needs. For instance, Python itself is documented into reST, which is then rendered in HTML to build http://docs.python.org, and in various other formats.

The minimum elements one should know to start...