Are there any tools for HTML/XML-to-reStructuredText?
People have tossed the idea around, and some implementations of reStructuredText-generating tools can be found in the Docutils Link List. There’s no reason why reStructuredText should not be round-trippable to/from XML; any technicalities which prevent round-tripping would be considered bugs. Whitespace would not be identical, but paragraphs shouldn’t suffer. The tricky parts would be the smaller details, like links and IDs and other bookkeeping. For HTML, true round-tripping may not be possible. Even adding lots of extra “class” attributes may not be enough. A “simple HTML” to RST filter is possible — for some definition of “simple HTML” — but HTML is used as dumb formatting so much that such a filter may not be particularly useful. An 80/20 approach should work though: build a tool that does 80% of the work automatically, leaving the other 20% for manual tweaks.
People have tossed the idea around, and some implementations of reStructuredText-generating tools can be found in the Docutils Link List. There’s no reason why reStructuredText should not be round-trippable to/from XML; any technicalities which prevent round-tripping would be considered bugs. Whitespace would not be identical, but paragraphs shouldn’t suffer. The tricky parts would be the smaller details, like links and IDs and other bookkeeping. For HTML, true round-tripping may not be possible. Even adding lots of extra “class” attributes may not be enough. A “simple HTML” to RST filter is possible — for some definition of “simple HTML” — but HTML is used as dumb formatting so much that such a filter may not be particularly useful. An 80/20 approach should work though: build a tool that does 80% of the work automatically, leaving the other 20% for manual tweaks.
