"cga2000" <cga2000@optonline.net> wrote in message [🔎] 20070211111158.GA799@turki.gavron.org">news:[🔎] 20070211111158.GA799@turki.gavron.org...
So far my personal doc system amounts to a patchwork of notes and cheat sheets in ascii files that I grep when I need to find some piece of information or other. I would like to switch to something a little more ambitious where I would be able to generate my docs in the usual popular formats, namely pdf, html, ps, txt, and possibly dvi. [snip] I am not concerned about typesetting .. the only requirement is that the contents of tables and samples should materialize in a non-proportional font in order to be legible. My only other requirement is that this "documentation system" should not require the implementation of complex gui tools. I want to do it in vim and use command line tools to generate the various formats. Would anyone have any recommendations as to how I should proceed?
I'm pretty sure what you want is ReStructuredText. It is developed for python. It uses a syntax VERY similar to what you showed. It does do proper formating. It is also designed such that it is easy to read the original text files. To avoid having email corrupt my example file I have posted it at http://monoport.com/1758The example file does not include the line number. If you try to copy the text
you will notice that the line numbers are not copied. That is correct. Anyway, to view the example output, copy that file and paste it into the text box on http://www.hosting4u.cz/jbar/rest/rest.html and push the render buton. I think you will find that the HTML output is very nice considering how simple the syntax is. If you are interested I suggest reading http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/user/rst/quickstart.html Which will explain a few more features. The main page to find more information is http://docutils.sourceforge.net/rst.htmlIf you have any questions, feel free to contact me off list.