Question

I use restructuredText, and I like what smartypants does for Markdown. Is there a way to enable the same thing for restructuredText?

Answer 1

As Alex Martelli says, smartyPants is what I need. However, I was looking for a little more detailed info on how to use it. So here’s a Python script that reads the file named in the first command line argument, converts it to HTML, using Pygments for sourcecode, and then passses it through smartypants for prettifying.

#!/usr/bin/python
# EASY-INSTALL-SCRIPT: 'docutils==0.5','rst2html.py'
"""
A minimal front end to the Docutils Publisher, producing HTML.
"""

try:
    from ulif.rest import directives_plain
    from ulif.rest import roles_plain
    from ulif.rest import pygments_directive

    import locale
    locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, '')
except:
  pass

from docutils.core import publish_doctree, publish_from_doctree
from smartypants import smartyPants
import sys


description = ('Personal docutils parser with extra features.')

doctree = publish_doctree(file(sys.argv[1]).read())
result = publish_from_doctree(doctree, writer_name='html')
result = smartyPants(result)
print result