ReStructuredText

reStructuredText (RST, ReST, or reST) is a plain-text markup language primarily used for technical documentation and other textual data. It serves a role similar to that of Markdown but includes additional semantic features for more complex document structuring. Prominent, large-scale, open-source projects that rely on reStructuredText include the Python programming language community for its official documentation, the Linux kernel docs, CMake, and the LLVM compiler project.

It is part of the Docutils project of the Python Doc-SIG (Documentation Special Interest Group), aimed at creating a set of tools for Python similar to Javadoc for Java or Plain Old Documentation (POD) for Perl. Docutils can extract comments and information from Python programs, and format them into various forms of program documentation.

In this sense, reStructuredText is a lightweight markup language designed to be both processable by documentation-processing software such as Docutils, and be easily readable by human programmers who are reading and writing Python source code.

History

reStructuredText evolved from an earlier lightweight markup language called StructuredText (developed by Zope). There were a number of problems with StructuredText, and reST was developed to address them.

The name reStructuredText was chosen to indicate that reST is a "revised, reworked, and reinterpreted StructuredText."

Parts of the reST syntax were inspired by the Setext language from the early 1990s. Elements of the common RFC822 Internet Message Format and Javadoc formats were also considered for inclusion in the design.