[Doc-SIG] Status of "structured text"

[Mike F Miller]

I'm currently working on writing a medium sized tool that needs good
embedded documentation, both for producing 'external' documents and
for producing `-help` docs. I'd like to use the same string for both
and have it formatted decently. For example, I'm thinking that having
the ability to do something like...

if __name__ == '__main__':
    """
    This program runs a mpv test. The following options are available:
      (list the options, blah, blah, link, blah)
    """
    help_re    = re.compile("\-h(elp)?")
    for arg in sys.argv[1:]:
        if help_re.match(sys.argv[i]):
            print prettyparser(__doc__) # might be wrong syntax...


Would be a really good thing. Of course this implies a python
prettyparser module of some kind. I was thinking that something like
it might exist to parse the structured text format, or will eventually
need to exist to support the SIGs goals...

Any thoughts or comments? Am I nuts, or should I try and write a
structured text reformatter? Or a html->txt converter and use html
instead?

Thanks,

 - Mike