rst-playground

A fully browser-based reStructuredText playground that anyone can use without setting up a server. Try it out at https://waldyrious.github.io/rst-playground.

Motivation

This project was triggered by the two previous playgrounds (http://rst.ninjs.org and https://livesphinx.herokuapp.com) having stopped working as of December 2022, and because I am more used to markdown and too lazy to learn rST properly, so I find myself often needing such a playground where I can try out the syntax and see how it renders. (Also because I've been curious about Pyodide for a while, so it was an opportunity to give it a try.)

More detailed background:

• Though there are various implementations of rST parsers, the reference/canonical one seems to be docutils, which includes, among other modules, rst2html (converts from reStructuredText to HTML).
• Existing browser-based playgrounds called back to a server-side renderer in Python, also relying on docutils.
  • Note: "called" is in the past tense because both rst.ninjs.org (source: anru/rsted), and livesphinx.herokuapp.com, a fork of the former, (source: readthedocs/livesphinx) are defunct as of December 2022.
• There doesn't seem to be any pure JavaScript implementation which could be used in a fully client-side browser app.
  • There is seikichi.github.io/restructured, which does work fully in-browser, but it's incomplete and unmaintained.
  • docutils-js is an attempt to port docutils to JavaScript, but it's also incomplete, and appears to be abandoned as well.
  • rst-live-preview is written in JavaScript, but it relies on the Python CLI tool rst2html5 (attention, this is not docutils' rst2html, though see this and this) to do the actual conversion.
• Given the lack of a pure-JavaScript rST renderer, perhaps Pyodide could be used to run the Python-based rst2html directly the in the browser.
• Pyodide even has the relevant packages (docutils and pygments). See docs: Loading packages.

Status

A basic prototype is up and running. The webpage is live at https://waldyrious.github.io/rst-playground. It uses Pyodide to call docutils to convert rST content entered into the <textarea> on the left, and shows the resulting HTML in the <iframe> on the right.

Check the open issues for planned improvements. Pull requests are welcome!