ANN: ReSTedit 0.2 - an OS X GUI for interactively exploring ReStructuredText

[Dinu Gherman]

Hi,

the last one for today is "ReSTedit", a native Mac OS X Cocoa GUI
tool using PyObjC and Docutils to provide an intuitive way of
exploring, editing and rendering text in the ReStructuredText
format. Please see the attached Readme below. As usual I'm grate-
ful for any comments or insights you might have to share!

Regards,

Dinu

--
Dinu C. Gherman
......................................................................
"There comes a point when we the people must demand more of our
elected officials than just showing up." (Arnold Schwarzenegger)



ReSTedit
=========

Summary
-------

ReSTedit is a Mac OS X demo for interactively exploring 
ReStructuredText.

Overview
--------

ReSTedit is a GUI tool for editing and interactivly exploring texts
in the ReStructuredText [1]_ format (or ReST) as introduced by the
Docutils [2]_ project. Despite being very simple ReSTedit is very
useful for quickly checking if Docutils renders some text as you
would expect it. You only paste it into a ReSTedit window to see
if it's ok or not, without writing any test code around it.

Basics
------

ReSTedit is extremely simple to use. You paste an input text into
the lower half of a window or type it in there and ReSTedit renders
your text into the default HTML format which it displays in the
upper half of the window. The rendering takes place silently in the
background and the upper output half will tell you which errors
were detected if there were any. And that's it. When you're done
you can copy your text out, again... Hyperlinks are displayed the
usual way and are clickable, too (launching your default webbrowser).
And images are also correctly displayed (don't forget the file://
prefix for local files!).

History
-------

:0.1: first release, relying on an external Python interpreter
:0.2: repackaged with Python 2.2.3 and PyObjC 1.0b and
       Docutils 0.3 included

Requirements
------------

There are no special requirements for running ReSTedit. From
version 0.2 it ships as a standalone application which should be
running on any Mac OS X 10.x, althouth it was developped on 10.2.
As it comes with full source code you can build ReSTedit yourself,
if you have Apple's developer tools installed, plus some Python
interpreter version 2.2 or higher, plus PyObjC 1.0b [3]_.

Licence
-------

ReSTedit is released under the GPL - see the included file,
"GPL.txt".

Download
--------

The ReSTedit distribution, screenshots and a sample movie of
ReSTedit in action are all available from:

   http://python.net/~gherman/ReSTedit.html

Notes
------

Among other GUI tools similar to ReSTedit is DocFactory [4]_.
If you know more of them, please send me a short note.

Future
------

ReSTedit is really just a proof of concept. I'm certainly not
planning to make it a full-fledged editor. Right now, ReSTedit
does nothing meaningful when attempting to save or open a file,
but this will be enabled, soon. As usual: your help and
suggestions are very welcome!

Links
-----

.. [1] http://docutils.sourceforge.net/spec/rst/reStructuredText.html
.. [2] http://docutils.sourceforge.net
.. [3] http://pyobjc.sourceforge.net
.. [4] http://docutils.sourceforge.net/sandbox/gschwant/docfactory/doc/

Author
------

Dinu Gherman,
dinu at mac dot com,
2003-09-09