Status of reStructured Text migration (February 2012)

Categories: Documentation Created by François Suter

Recent months were a busy time for all involved, but the migration of the official documentation to reStructured Text has picked up again. Here is a rough update on the situation.

The migration process has come a big step forward recently. Martin Bless had been working for quite a while on the best way to write tables in reST. Indeed we have a lot of tables in our documentation and it seemed like the normal way of writing them in reST would be far too cumbersome. With the help of so-called "field-list tables", now fully implemented by Martin, this is far easier.

This paves the way for the next step, which is the conversion of existing OpenOffice manuals. Martin has already done some promising tries. The current process involves saving the SXW files as HTML, parsing the output and transforming it into reST. The reST files can then be rendered, in particular to HTML again for online viewing. The parser needs refinements, but the first tries are very encouraging.

Martin will hold a workshop at the T3DD12, so make sure to join him if you are interested in the topic.

About the schedule, we do not expect to be ready in time for the release of TYPO3 4.7. So the official documentation will be updated in OpenOffice format one more (and hopefully last) time. However documentation from the BLE project already exists in reST format and we will use it to develop the rendering pipeline and provide it online in HTML, probably not on the final documentation server, but in an official temporary place.

For more regular information, don't hesitate to read the minutes of the monthly Documentation Team meetings.