If you're familiar with MarkDown, you already know the very basics of rST.
You can experiment with rST in the GitHub Wiki. It's not a complete reStructuredText implementation, but it's enough to get started with.
Log in at GitHub (if necessary create a new account). You need to be logged in for the following steps to work.
Create a new page there for yourself.
Then, set the Edit mode to reStructuredText:
Now you can build a page for yourself; add some text, and hit Preview to see the result.
Use the following markup in your page.
========== Page title ========== Heading ======= Sub-heading ----------- Sub-sub-heading ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Sub-sub-sub-heading ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Sub-sub-sub-sub-heading ....................... Sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-heading ''''''''''''''''''''''''''' Ordinary paragraph text. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Maecenas tempus, dui in pharetra luctus, turpis nisl rhoncus tellus, vitae gravida nibh odio nec diam. Fusce non mi ut odio accumsan ultricies ut nec nulla. Phasellus nec odio sit amet neque dignissim tempor eget non ex. Aliquam sed lacinia lectus, eu congue est. Ut ac dignissim risus.
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*emphasis* **strong emphasis** ``literal``
Note how nested items are indented to line up with their parents:
* item * item * nested item * nested item * item #. numbered item #. numbered item #. nested numbered item #. nested numbered item #. numbered item
A simple example of a code-block:
:: @aperture.setter def aperture(self, value): if value == "A": self.exposure_control_system.mode = "Shutter priority" elif not 1.7 <= value <= 16: raise self.ApertureOutOfRange else: self.exposure_control_system.mode = "Manual" self.exposure_control_system.aperture_set_lever.aperture = value self._aperture = value
Note that in the GitHub wiki, these are not well-formatted - real Sphinx documentation does a better job.
.. note:: Please turn the lights off if you are the last to leave. As well as ``note``, you can use ``attention``, ``caution``, ``danger``, ``error``, ``hint``, ``important``, ``tip``, ``warning``, ``seealso``.
.. admonition:: Security notice The generic ``admonition`` directive allows you to provide a title, as above.
There are multiple ways of building tables in rST, the simplest is the list table:
.. list-table:: :widths: 20 20 30 :header-rows: 1 * - Web framework - Language - First release * - Django - Python - July 2005 * - Ruby on Rails - Ruby - August 2004 * - Laravel - PHP - June 2011
A basic, "dumb" link to an external resource:
`This is an example <https://example.com>`_
reStructuredText provides much more powerful internal and external linking, but this is not available in the GitHub wiki, only as part of a real Sphinx documentation set.