[FM Discuss] sphinx/ restructured text (was: Documenting internals [...])

[Douglas Bagnall]

A while ago on the tech list I was advocating the use of
reStructuredText (Sphinx's native format) for the booki backend, but I
was dissuaded.

The problem is that the input method has to be a web embedded WYSIWYG
editor, and such editors produce (at best) loosely structured xhtml.
And all our existing manuals are in this format.  There is no easy way
to convert arbitrary xhtml into a semantically structured format like
reStructuredText.

So while reStructuredText seems like it would be a really sensible and
valuable medium for FM to use in its core, it is difficult to get
there from here without introducing bugs in existing chapters and
causing problems in the writing process.

It would be great to try generating reStructuredText as an output
format, though, and this would be a good test for whether an eventual
switch might be possible or desirable.


Douglas