“Why I prefer rST to Markdown”

This is my second book written with Sphinx, after the new Learn TLA+. Sphinx uses a peculiar markup called reStructured Text (rST), which has a steeper learning curve than markdown. I only switched to it after writing a couple of books in markdown and deciding I needed something better. So I want to talk about why rst was that something.

Hillel Wayne

I've never liked Markdown - I find it quite arbitrary and unpleasant to look at, and the fact there's countless variants that all differ a tiny bit doesn't help - so even though I don't actually use Markdown for anything, I always have a passing interest in possible alternatives, if only to see what other, different, and unique ideas are out there when it comes to relatively simple markup languages. Now, I'm quite sure reStructured Text isn't for me either, since I feel like it's far more powerful than Markdown, and serves a different, more complex purpose.

That being said, I figured I'd highlight it here since it seems it may be interesting to some of you who work on documentation for your software projects or similar endeavours.