October 23, 2007

reSTinPeace Beta Release

I only recently found out about reSTinPeace (now I check, I see it is yet another fuzzyman recommendation) and managed to install it very easily using easy_install (which I installed as a part of the process).

Although it's in beta the author claims to be adding features, so I figure he's looking for user feedback. Give it a try and see what you think, offer your feedback if you want. It isn't finished yet but it looks like it's going to be a very useful tool, and I hope that eventually it will make the task of contributing to the Python documentation even easier than it currently is.

5 comments:

Doug Napoleone said...

This is a fantastic tool for anyone working on their 2008 Talk Proposal.

The primary part of the proposal is a REST document which is edited online. The online editor (like most wiki style editors) requires you to continually hit a 'preview' button to see your changes/progress. Using this tool you can easily develop your proposal in a natural way before submission.

You can practice with one of the example proposal like this one.

NOTE: you can edit your proposal after submission as well.

The main PyCon site is a ReStructuredText Wiki (which requires login permissions for editing). This tool can be used for developing the core site as well.

kib said...

Hi Steven,

thanks for giving me some feedbacks, to be true I've got very few ones only.

Doug-->
you're wrong on one point : with reStInPeace, you'll have to press a "update" button too to see your changes. The first version I made used dynamlic viewing and I had to change the implementation because it was rather slow with big docs. But I added a shortcut for this (Ctrl+R) so it's not so annoying.

There are other problems too : the CSS-like browser is only 'css-like'.
So, something like :

div h1 {
text-align : center;
}

won't work because of Qt4 handles things differently. In fact, you're forced write :

div h1 {
margin-left: 50px;
}

and specify the margin in pixels...problematic.

Here's my todo list for the next versions :

- chained snippets;
- table handling;

If you've got other ideas, please tell-me.

Steve said...

kib: I see you are a recent addition to the blogger ranks - welcome! I think your program will be very useful, so congratulations on getting it into beta.

kib said...

Hi Steve,

just to let you know that the beta 0.8 has been released tonight with some basic table support.

Hope you like it,

Kib.

Steve said...

I have downloaded and run the 0.8 beta on Windows, and have briefly tested the table features, which I like (though a fixed-pitch font in the edit window helps to avoid "malformed table" messages).

A link to the reST quick reference wouldn't go amiss for those of us not as familiar with reST as we should be. It might be a good idea for new users to load that document into reSTinPeace to see how it goes!