How good? Let me tell you...

• Sup­­port for PDF ta­ble of con­­tents

• Sec­­tion names and num­bers in head­­er­s/­­foot­ers

• Com­­pressed PDFs (or not)

• Guess im­age sizes. Spe­­cial­­ly if you meant to use them in a web page and de­­clared just ":width: 50%"

• Gut­ter mar­­gin sup­­port

• Raw di­rec­­tive (in­sert page­breaks and ver­ti­­cal space man­u­al­­ly)

• Of­fers a do­cu­til­s-­­com­­pli­ant API (and an­oth­er API, too)

• In­­­clude full or par­­tial files for code-block. That means you can ex­­tract code and show it in your doc­u­­men­t!

• Huge code cleanup lead by Nico­las Lau­rance.

• Work­ing mul­ti­lin­gual hy­phen­a­tion. You can have a per-­­para­­graph lan­guage and hy­phen­ate it cor­rec­t­­ly.

I am a big Alexan­dre Du­mas fan. He's the di­rect an­ces­tor of Neal Stephen­son, so many of you should like him too. So I used one of his best books to try some au­to­mat­ic type­set­ting of project guten­berg texts.

No, the whole book did not con­vert with­out er­rors, and yes, there is some man­u­al work in what you are about to see, but hey, take a look.

Here's a far look of the first two pages:

And here's some de­tail of the typset­ting:

Yes, the type­set­ting is not re­al­ly La­TeX qual­i­ty, but it's not bad, ei­ther.

Com­pare it with the HTML ver­sion at project Guten­berg. The type­set­ting is a thing of beau­ty com­pared to that :-(

The im­age is a pic­ture of Chateau d'If from flick­r, re­leased un­der Cre­ative Com­mon­s. The ti­tle font is Scripti­na, I chose it be­cause it looks 19th cen­tu­ry but mod­ern.

I did a re­lease yes­ter­day, and an­oth­er to­day of my rst-­to-pdf-with­out-la­tex tool. What's new? Here's an in­com­plete list:

New in 0,4

• Fixed bul­let and item lists in­­­den­­ta­­tion/nest­ing.

• Im­­ple­­men­t­ed ci­­ta­­tions

• Work­ing links be­tween foot­notes and its re­f­er­ences

• Jus­ti­­fi­­ca­­tion en­abled by de­­fault

• Fixed ta­ble bug (de­­mo.txt works now)

• Ti­­tle and au­thor sup­­port in PDF prop­er­ties

• Sup­­port for doc­u­­ment ti­­tle in head­­er/­­foot­er

• Cus­­tom page sizes in stylesheet

New in 0.3

• Font em­bed­d­ing (use any True Type font in your PDF­s)

• Syn­­tax high­­­lighter us­ing Pyg­­ments

• User's man­u­al

• Ex­ter­­nal/­­cus­­tom stylesheets

• Sup­­port for page num­bers in head­­er/­­foot­er

Of course, since I said I would re­lease some­thing ev­ery fri­day, this means I need to find some­thing else to re­lease? ;-)

This mini-sprint is do­ing won­ders for rst2pdf. Now on SVN: pyg­ments-based syn­tax high­light­ing. Ex­am­ple here: rst2pdf's code, in a PDF by rst2pdf.

Fol­low­ing my new pol­i­cy of one re­lease ev­ery fri­day, in 6 days you will see a rst2pdf re­lease. But not any re­lease: a great re­lease.

What will be new?

• Sup­­port for page num­ber/­sec­­tion names/­sec­­tion num­bers in head­­ers and foot­er­s.

• Cus­­tom in­­ter­pret­ed text roles (that means in­­­line styling ;-)

• Stylesheets de­fined in ex­ter­­nal files. The syn­­tax is JSON which may look a bit strange, but it works great.

• A Man­u­al!

• Easy True Type font em­bed­d­ing.

• May­be: syn­­tax high­­­light­ing di­rec­­tive via pyg­­ments. I know I could make it work us­ing the Im­age­­For­­mat­ter, but then you can't copy the code. There is a do­cu­til­s-sand­box project that does ex­ac­t­­ly what I wan­t.

I in­tend to call this re­lease 0.3.0, but maybe I will jump high­er, since there is not much more left to im­ple­men­t.