What is supported in Structured Text

.. note:: This text is a simple introduction into restructured Text. Of course it's not as complete as the `official documentation`_, but it can give an overview, especially with regard to how this is used in the "PyDS".

Structured Text (and restructured text) is just plain simple ascii text. The speciality is that it supports formatting and uses this primitive text formating to build HTML from this. So you can write just your text and the HTML will be built in the background.

The following elements of restructured text are supported in the "PyDS":

- paragraphs (normal, blockquotes, preformats)
- lists (unnumbered, numbered, with characters numbered, etc.)
- *italics* and **bold**
- automatic parsing of links (mailto and http)
- headlines (usually not used, as your stories and your postings already have headlines)
- definition lists
- simple links within the document (like this one to the `Source of this story`_)
- external links like to Python_
- citations like [cit001]_
- footnotes like [2]_ (actually citations and footnotes are the same)
- .. image:: http://muensterland.org/muensterland.gif

.. hint:: Undefined elements of restructured text are usually just ignored and their content is rendered as plain text. But this might lead to weird formattings from time to time. This is especially true for directives as listed in the `directives documentation`_, as only part of it is implemented int reST itself.

Advanced features
-----------------

Macros and stuff like that still works, as the restructured text processor is just applied before handing over the text to the cheetah template engine. If there are problems with macro expressions and restructured text interpretation, just put your macro into backticks. This is usefull for links in macro calls: Docutils would interpret them and so break the layout and macro call. So just put them into \` characters.

.. note:: both (the "PyDS" and restructured text) support shortcuts. Both forms should work. For example |PyDS| links to the homepage in the same way as "PyDS". |:-O|

The source for this story
-------------------------

You can look at the source of this story for samples of what is supported:

.. _Source of this story:

$macros.quotedStorySource(16)

.. _Python: http://www.python.org/
.. _official documentation: http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/rst/quickref.html
.. _directives documentation: http://docutils.sourceforge.net/spec/rst/directives.html

.. [cit001] Put your citation stuff here
.. [2] This is your footnote number two