Sunday, September 13, 2009

Live preview of reStructuredText to HTML conversion in your browser

I've implemented a new plugin for Crunchy which may be of interest to some: a reStructuredText editor with live preview inside the browser window.  Each time a key is pressed in the editor (html textarea), an ajax request is sent to the Python backend with the entire content of the editor.  This is processed by docutils with the result sent back to the browser as a full html page displayed inside the browser as illustrated below.

I expected this to be slow (make that very slow) and for the first prototype I wrote, I only sent the ajax request when "enter" was pressed.  After playing with it for a while, I realized that there was no need for this.

If you type fast enough, the previewer does not keep up for each key press, but this does not hinder in any way the speed at which you can enter text in the editor.  By the way, the editor (html textarea) can be converted into a true embedded editor which can save and load files, etc. - otherwise, it would not be a very useful tool for working with reStructuredText documents.  When doing so, the live preview is turned off.  I've also included the possibility to save the html file produced so that one does not have to invoke docutils separately.  And this also incorporates the two custom directives (crunchy and getpythonsource) used by Crunchy and crst2s5.

This is included in the newest release (1.1.2) of Crunchy.

3 comments:

Eric said...

is there a way we can try it too ?

André Roberge said...

As I mentioned, this is included in the latest release of Crunchy

Eric said...

thank you ! (I didn't it was there)