Create simple HTML from RST

Overview

Sometimes one needs to create a simple HTML file, with nice formatting without spending too much time on it. There is a simple way to do it, by converting RST file to HTML.

This post will show you how to create a simple HTML file

Requirements

• Python

• docutils package

Setup

One should install the docutils package using pip:

pip install docutils

Examples

Convert RST to HTML5

Following example will convert this RST file to HTML5:

Hint

This is a simple RST file, with some basic formatting.

Following command will convert the RST file to HTML5. This is very simple command. One can do much more with the rst2html5 command, for example:

• create a table of contents

• add custom CSS

• add/remove some parts of document

• and much more, for more details please see Resources section below

rst2html5 create-simple-html-from-rst.rst create-simple-html-from-rst.html

Example Output

Following screenshots shows two screenshots, one with RST file and second with HTML file:

Useful Commands

Following is a list of few (not all) commands from docutils package:

Command	Info
rst2html4	Convert RST to HTML4
rst2html5	Convert RST to HTML5
rst2latex	Convert RST to LaTeX
rst2man	Convert RST to Man pages
rst2odt	Convert RST to ODT

Conclusion

This post showed how to create a simple HTML file from RST file. This is very simple and easy to do. Also there are many more options available in the docutils package, for more details please see Resources section below.

Resources

• RST to HTML5 documentation

Emacs TAB Issue in Makefile