[Docutils-users] Two ideas for implementation

[Alli Q. <alq...@gm...>]

Hello everyone,
I'm a regular user and a great fan of docutils and ReST; I use it to
write reports and other documents and I even wrote my bachelor thesis
in it. Thank you all for the hard work you put in the project!

This year at school I signed up for an open-source programming class
which includes participating in an actual project; I'd like to
contribute something to Docutils. There are two ideas I have and I
need to decide between. My concern is mostly about how long would each
idea take to implement and how complicated it would be; I'm fluent in
Python and I wrote some custom extensions for docutils before, but I'm
still no expert on how docutils work internally.

First idea is inspired by a recent post [1] in this list asking about
the "field-list-table" directive. Is there still interest in this? Is
someone working on it at the moment? As far as I can tell this seems
like a rather easy thing to do, basically just transforming the field
list into a table in the internal tree representation. Am I missing
something (apart from correct terminology)?

The second idea is a much more complex one. I'm not a huge LaTeX fan;
it does the job for me most of the time, but without rst2latex I'd be
lost. Adjusting stuff by hand typically takes too much tweaking and
I'm not very satisfied with the documentation.

On the other hand, the documentation of ConTeXt [2] is very nice and
well organized and I like the system more in general. So I thought
about creating a ConTeXt writer, to have a rst2context tool in the
end. Again, if I understand correctly, that woul mean taking some of
the existing *tex writers and modifying it accordingly. Is there a
sample document using all directives, where I would be able to test
how far I progressed? What are the standards for creating new writers
and for accepting them into upstream?

What are your thoughts? Is there some other feature/bug that is more
important, yet easy enough for me to work on? Something from the
docutils ToDo [3] perhaps :) ?

Thanks in advance for your suggestions!
al-Quaknaa

P.S.: I'm away for the weekend so I may not respond immediately, but I
will eventually.

[1] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.text.docutils.user/6456
[2] http://wiki.contextgarden.net/Main_Page
[3] http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/dev/todo.html