Alternatives for reST -> PDF

Howdy all,

reStructuredText is wonderful; a simple, unambiguous, unobtrusive
markup that gives a lot of expressive power.

Conversion to XHTML or XML is simple. Conversion to PDF isn't so great.

That's because (La)TeX is *not* simple, nor unobtrusive. It refuses to
work as a simple pipeline. It sprays files I don't care about all over
the directory. It requires running multiple times to get a single
result. It fails to deal with the Unicode character set cleanly. And
so on.

Now, if I want to fix the problems with (La)TeX, I should go to a
group dealing with that topic. They will instruct me on how to fix the
documents and run the programs in different ways.

But I'm not writing the stuff; I'm just trying to deal with it as an
intermediary document format. I don't care about (La)TeX, except as
part of a pipeline from reST to PDF. And that part of the pipeline is
too awkward; I don't want to increase my knowledge of it.

What alternatives are there? Can I render from reST to PDF via some
other, more reliable route, avoiding (La)TeX and all its annoyances?

--

-- 
 \        "The number of UNIX installations has grown to 10, with more |
  `\     expected."  -- Unix Programmer's Manual, 2nd Ed., 12-Jun-1972 |
_o__)                                                                  |
Ben Finney

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