I still wonder why Markdown is so popular while reStructuredText is not. I find the latter much easier to read, it looks better in both plain and rendered format (and rst2pdf makes nice docs).
Well, one thing that definitely isn't helping is its horrible name. And as evidence, the very first thing on their site:
"'reStructuredText' is ONE word, not two!"
I'm definitely never going to type out that entire word, so now do I abbreviate it to reST? or ReST like some people on the site seem to be doing? It'll just get confused with REST in Google searches...
Markdown is 'lighter' and aimed at the more general case: churning out lightly-formatted text quickly, with as few 'rules' as possible, with page layout concerns addressed by templates defined elsewhere.
reStructuredText is 'heavier' and only really an improvement over Markdown if you're trying to embed page layout into the text. Which fewer people are.
You are right. I think I prefer reST because it produces documents. It's not a quick way to add markup, it's a quick way to structure a document (and provide links, sections, inline code etc).
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I still wonder why Markdown is so popular while reStructuredText is not. I find the latter much easier to read, it looks better in both plain and rendered format (and rst2pdf makes nice docs).
Well, one thing that definitely isn't helping is its horrible name. And as evidence, the very first thing on their site:
"'reStructuredText' is ONE word, not two!"
I'm definitely never going to type out that entire word, so now do I abbreviate it to reST? or ReST like some people on the site seem to be doing? It'll just get confused with REST in Google searches...
Markdown is 'lighter' and aimed at the more general case: churning out lightly-formatted text quickly, with as few 'rules' as possible, with page layout concerns addressed by templates defined elsewhere.
reStructuredText is 'heavier' and only really an improvement over Markdown if you're trying to embed page layout into the text. Which fewer people are.
You are right. I think I prefer reST because it produces documents. It's not a quick way to add markup, it's a quick way to structure a document (and provide links, sections, inline code etc).
Personally I found the RST documentation quite inaccessible for doing simple things.