Introduction

This document gives an introduction to the prest program, which is a Perl implementation of a reStructuredText parser (and writers) and gives a map of the documentation.

reStructuredText is an easy-to-read, what-you-see-is-what-you-get plaintext markup syntax and parser system. It is useful for inline program documentation (such as Python docstrings), for quickly creating simple web pages, and for standalone documents. This web page was generated from reStructuredText. The original implementation of a reStructuredText parser is that of the docutils project, written in Python. The "prest" name is an acronym for "Perl reStructuredText".

Documentation

Since prest is a re-implementation of a reStructuredText parser, it has diverged from the original Python version, both because the Python version has made changes not tracked by the Perl version and because the Perl version has added some innovations of its own. So the documentation references have potentially three versions: the prest version, the Docutils version, and a difference between the two. The difference is based on the latest Docutils version available when the prest documentation was compiled.