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Abandonment issues: rst2pdf

Of all the corpses of my pro­ject­s, there is one thatI feel worse about, which is rst2pdf. I feel bad about aband­non­ing sev­er­al, but rst2pdf was ac­tu­al­ly a use­ful tool, used by a bunch of peo­ple, and that it has nev­er gath­ered enough mo­men­tum with oth­er de­vel­op­ers is sad.

So, I will pick it up. I will spend about 4 hours a week on it. The plan is to:

  1. Gath­­er some patch­es that are lin­ger­ing on the is­­sue track­­er

  2. Fix some sim­­ple-ish bugs

  3. Make an­oth­er re­lease with 1) and 2)

And of course:

  1. Not let it fall in dis­­re­­pair again

In the meantime, here is a nice thing I just heard about. Dimitri Christodoulou has hacked rst2pdf so that it can handle the raw:: html directive.

This, dear friends is com­plete­ly nut­s, ab­so­lute­ly out of scope for any giv­en do­cu­tils tool, and just too cool :-)

I will try to hi­jack his code (prop­er cred­it and so on), and in­cor­po­rate it in­to rst2pdf.

And Dim­itri, or any­one else who wants to do cool stuff with rst2pdf: let me know! I will give you com­mit rights im­me­di­ate­ly!

freetstar / 2012-01-09 06:01:

many thanks for the rst2pdf,but as a chinese programmer,rst2pdf cannot handle the chinese language very well,please take it into the consideration of rst2pdf's next version^_^thx

Roberto Alsina / 2012-01-09 12:07:

I have fixed as much as I could when I got bug reports from chinese users. OTOH, not being able to read or write chinese, there is only so much I could do, and this would need a chinese programmer to improve.

For example, there are lots of mentions of rst2pdf in japanese, and a japanese guy did http://rst2pdf.net which is really cool, so with native speaker involvement, I don't see why it's not possible.

Kay Hayen / 2012-01-09 11:39:

I am using it for all my presentation and documentation needs and manuals. And rst2pdf convinced me it is worthwhile. 

Heck, I even want to change from wordpress to whatever it is that allows to write articles in ReST now. So, well, it's kind of sad that I don't join you, but instead work on Nuitka. 
Kay

Roberto Alsina / 2012-01-09 12:05:

That's really cool to hear! BTW: I am very impressed with Nuitka!

Aaron Toponce / 2012-01-09 12:28:

Unfortunately for rst2pdf(1), I have abandoned it in favor of rst2latex(1) and then pdflatex(1). While noisy, it works, and IMO works better than rst2pdf(1). Good luck on the project!

Geert Van de Velde / 2012-01-11 11:04:

Good to hear that you are picking it up again! I'm using it for writing release notes. 

paul21 / 2012-01-18 04:46:

Más me dolería que muera Python no muerde...

Rahul Savani / 2012-02-01 22:46:

This is fantastic news. This academic year I switched from LaTeX to rst2pdf for slides and exercise sheets (and to Sphinx for module webpages).


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