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Comment by marcosdumay | Hacker News Reader

I'm going to second that.

RestructuredText is very powerful, and has an official specification. Basically what Markdown is missing. Yet, it is plain text and easy to parse.

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I like reStructuredText, but the format is grating compared to markdown. The two things I do the most are sectioning and links. Inline links are ok in rst, but I prefer markdown. Sectioning though is awful. I hate having to hold the damn == or -- or ~~ down and getting the length right. It's easier to parse when you read the plaintext, but makes me loath writing it. Most the time I deal with md or rst, they end up formatted anyway, which is the point IMO.

Personally I don't think sectioning is that bad, a little annoying when working with other people that don't do it, though...

   foo
   ======================

... the easy and built-in extensibility is a huge plus though, as is Sphinx and the pretty good output writers for many formats. Sphinx btw. works with Markdown, too.

Quite possibly my biggest annoyance with rST/Sphinx is the hanging toctree issue, and poor support for multi-format images/figures.

The 100 % offline search in Sphinx is somewhat of a mixed bag and doesn't always give good results, though it's fine for reference works.

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