Re: Alternatives for reST -> PDF

On Tue, 28 Mar 2006, Ben Finney wrote:

> 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.

the difference is. you convert to xhtml and the rendering is done in the 
browser. you convert to latex-code and the rendering is done by latex.

> 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.

latex is dead simple too me, how easy can one get::

   pdflatex abc.tex

> 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.

which problems do you have ?

> 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?

sandbox/dpriest/XSL-FO is a posibility the rlpdf-writer is rather minimal, 
but if it suffices for you ...

cheers

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