[Docutils-users] Custom writer

[Patrick K. O'B. <po...@or...>]

I'm wondering how hard it is to create a custom writer. In particular, 
one that produces a particular type of xml file. I've read all the 
docutils documentation and most of the emphasis seems to be on how to 
write text using RST, or what kind of HTML it produces. What I haven't 
seen much of is how to use RST for a particular application.

Here is what I have in mind. IBM has a custom xml specification for 
tutorial files. When you create a tutorial in their xml format, they 
have a bunch of tools that transform that xml into several html files 
(with the IBM headers, footers, etc.), a US letter size PDF, an A4 size 
PDF, a zip file, etc. I just did my first tutorial for them and I used 
my own xml-generating Python utility to do so. It worked, but it wasn't 
exactly pretty and it was too much work, compared to a structured text 
approach.

What I'd like to do next is be able to create tutorials in structured 
text and have a tool that produces a valid IBM tutorial xml file. Can 
anyone tell me if this is a sensible application of RST? One of the 
constraints is that it would have to limit the structured text to the 
features that are supported by the IBM tutorial xml spec. The current 
tools seem to me (and I could be wrong) to expect to be able to handle 
the full range of RST conventions. The other issue is whether the IBM 
format expects certain things that RST doesn't currently allow.

The IBM tutorial stuff is called Toot-O-Matic (no joke) and is available 
at https://www6.software.ibm.com/dl/devworks/dw-tootomatic-p. It's 
mostly Java and XSL stuff.

An article about it is at 
http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-toot/index.html

Any suggestions or advice would be greatly appreciated.

-- 
Patrick K. O'Brien
Orbtech      http://www.orbtech.com/web/pobrien
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