reStructuredText Markup Specification
- Contact:
- docutils-develop@lists.sourceforge.net
- Revision:
- 10399
- Date:
- 2026-09-05
- Copyright:
- This document has been placed in the public domain.
reStructuredText is plaintext that uses simple and intuitive constructs to indicate the structure of a document. These constructs are equally easy to read in raw and processed forms. This document is itself an example of reStructuredText (raw, if you are reading the text file, or processed, if you are reading an HTML document, for example). The reStructuredText parser is a component of Docutils.
Simple, implicit markup is used to indicate special constructs, such as section headings, bullet lists, and emphasis. The markup used is as minimal and unobtrusive as possible. Less often-used constructs and extensions to the basic reStructuredText syntax may have more elaborate or explicit markup.
reStructuredText is applicable to documents of any length, from the very small (such as inline program documentation fragments, e.g. Python docstrings) to the quite large (this document).
The first section gives a quick overview of the syntax of the reStructuredText markup by example. A complete specification is given in the Syntax Details section.
Literal blocks (in which no markup processing is done) are used for examples throughout this document, to illustrate the plaintext markup.