27 lines
1.2 KiB
Markdown
27 lines
1.2 KiB
Markdown
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title = 'Render reStructuredText Directly to Firefox'
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date = 2013-01-23T18:13:00Z
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[reStructuredText](http://docutils.sourceforge.net/rst.html) is awesome.
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Anytime I need to write something in plain text, I mark it up using rST. It
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looks nice in plain text form, and can be rendered to HTML for improved
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presentation.
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Sometimes, as I am working on a document, I'd like to see what it looks like
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once rendered to HTML, to make sure I am thinking the same way the computer is.
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[Docutils](http://docutils.sourceforge.net/) ships with a nice little script
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called `rst2html` that will render a rST document as HTML, either to standard
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output or another file. What would be really nice is to be able to immediately
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preview the resulting HTML document in Firefox without the intermediate file.
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Unfortunately, Firefox doesn't read HTML from standard input, so `rst2html.py
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document.rst | firefox` doesn't work.
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I've come up with this workaround, however, that works just fine. Using
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`base64` and `xargs`, I construct a [Data
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URI](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_URI_scheme) and instruct Firefox to open
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that:
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```sh
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rst2html.py document.rst | base64 -w 0 | xargs -i firefox "data:text/html;charset=utf8;base64,{}"
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``` |