On 2010-01-12, eegg wrote:

> A conclusion I've come to is that reST/sphinx can potentially provide
> a *complete* replacement of things like OpenOffice.org.  In other
> words, I've found them to be ideal for the production non-technical
> documents.  I see reST/sphinx as a friendly plaintext formatting
> language providing an alternative to TeX and the like (of which I'm
> not a massive fan).

Things missing for to be useful in science, engineering and arts:

* citation/references support

* mathematics (available as extension)

> Which brings me to my question: is there no interest in using tools
> like sphinx in this regard, and if not, why?  It seems architecturally
> odd to me that both reST and sphinx provide many things which will
> only be of use to code documentation.

While Sphinx is build specifically for Python standard documentation,
reST is a generic markup language (and the Docutils_ reference
implementation lacks many of the code-doc specific Sphinx extensions).

> So a second question: would it make more sense to anyone else out
> there if the sphinx "python documentation generator" was a rather
> thinner set of utilities built on top of a generalized formatting
> suite?

The basic "generalized formatting suite" is Docutils_. It provides an API
for programmatic use and is actually used inside several alternative
document-processing frameworks (see
http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/user/links.html).


Günter

.. _Docutils: http://docutils.sourceforge.net

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