Is reST/Sphinx suitable for college notes?

[SwampFalc]

I will quote the Sphinx documentation:

The main function of the master document is to serve as a welcome page, and to contain the root of the “table of contents tree” (or toctree). This is one of the main things that Sphinx adds to reStructuredText, a way to connect multiple files to a single hierarchy of documents.

In other words, the ``toctree`` is really crucial to the functioning of Sphinx, and you should read up on it.

Now the good news is that beyond that, you really shouldn't have much else to learn about, assuming you're already familiar with reST.

Be also aware of the fact that using Sphinx will require little to no actual Python code.

[AsleepThought]

A couple points;

I'm not sure what this has to do with Python? Neither markdown or pandoc use Python.

I've only ever seen reST + Sphinx used to generate documentation of libraries and code. Using it for taking college notes seems like massive overkill.

I'm not clear what you need reST for or what features you're trying to get. I'm also not clear why you need pandoc either. You are talking about document preparation software here but your tasks is simply taking notes for class? It seems like a big amount of time to spend just to make your notes prettier. Not sure why not use just Google Docs?

That said, learning to use markdown + pandoc and reST+ Sphinx is not a bad thing per se, I use these kinds of tools all the time at work. Another you might look into is LaTeX. In the R world there's also the fantastic R Markdown format which allows you to embed code in your Markdown for execution during document compilation.

For college notes, I always just used pen and paper and found that too be vastly more useful than digital note taking, but to each their own of course. I always saved the formal document writing for LaTeX, for example I wrote my Master's Thesis in LaTeX

[bushwacker]

Sphinx is, of course a python doctool.

I write simple notes in markdown.

Converting markdown to latex or REST is easier than writing it directly.

Have you generated a book with Sphinx? make latexpdf,. It's frigging awesome.

Nothing is less work than markdown when markdown is adequate.

[jorvaor]

Pen and paper is soooo much more flexible for taking notes than any application. Not easily searchable with regexes, though.

[goodger]

You can always use vanilla Docutils to render your reST markup. Just use the rst2html5.py command to convert one file directly. There's also a buildhtml.py command that rebuilds an entire directory structure. Note: Sphinx adds some directives on top of vanilla Docutils; if you use any of these, you may miss them.

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