[TYPO3-doc] reStructured Text migration update

[François Suter]

Hi all,

I had a long and nice conference call with Martin Bless this morning 
about reStructured Text and the current status of the project.

As was discussed before a recent focus of Martin was the so-called 
"field list tables" directive, which would offer us an easier way of 
writing tables in reST. This will be very useful as we have a lot of 
tables in the official documentation. This currently requires a tiny 
patch to the docutils core, but it's a minor issue. Martin may push for 
this to become part of the docutils core, but it requires more formal 
work (like writing unit tests, etc.) and is not a high priority task for 
now.

Martin also experimented a lot with Intersphinx. This is a Sphinx 
extension that enables cross-linking between documentation projects. 
This looks very promising and should enable us to do the kind of 
cross-linking we have long been hoping for.

The next big step is the conversion of the existing manuals. Martin has 
already experimented with this and the best way he found was to save the 
OpenOffice files to HTML and then parse them and turn them into reST. 
The missing link here is parsing the many tables and making them in the 
above-mentioned "field list tables" directive. Martin hopes to be able 
to make progress with this during the month of February. At that point 
we should have a browsable documentation, rendered from converted 
OpenOffice files. I think this will give the community a good feel for 
the way we are heading.

Martin (with the help of Martin Holtz) also plans to have some 
reST-related workshop at T3DD12.

We are currently experimenting on a development server. In particular 
Martin has been thoroughly documenting the server setup:

http://srv123.typo3.org/~mbless/DOCROOT_HTDOCS/Documentation/reStTools/html/

I know that there's quite some expectations about this project and we're 
doing our best. We're still all volunteers to the progress rate is 
dependent on our free time and energy. If you are interested in this 
topic, you are - as always - very welcome to help.

Cheers

-- 

Francois Suter
Cobweb Development Sarl - http://www.cobweb.ch