RestructuredText - Hyperlinks without leading and trailing spaces

Question

Is it possible to create hyperlinks without leading and trailing spaces? The following doesn't work:

re`Structured`_Text

.. _`Structured`: http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/user/rst/quickstart.html

The reason I'm asking is I'm working with Chinese text. Spaces are not used as word delimiters in Chinese. With the added spaces the text doesn't look well formatted, for example:

没有空格就对了。

versus

多了 空格 不好看。

Any ideas?

Uterus

I think you are stuck with spaces, unless you want to hack rst source. Are you open to post-processing the document and removing the spaces programmatically? – Sorrento

Or, are you open to using Markdown, which seems to handle such links successfully? – Desiree

@Mike, I guess your are right, I'm doing post-process for these docs now. @Greg, Unfortunately I'm working on some translation projects where .rst is used in the source. – Uterus

Answer 1

Eventually this is how I get away with this problem. Awkward, but works:

没有\ 空格_\就对了。
我觉得\ `中文和 RST`_\不够兼容。

.. _空格: http://a-link-with-pure-zh-te.xt
.. _`中文和 RST`: http://a-link-with-mixed-zh-and.en

Update: Since docutils 0.13 we can enable character level inline markup. This way we can write like below and save a few backslashes.

没有\ 空格_就对了。
我觉得`中文和 RST`_不够兼容。

This option is enabled via the command line switch:

python rst2html.py --character-level-inline-markup 1.rst > 1.html

Uterus

Ironically, as with other documentation tools, the project's internals are not very well documented... – Epigastrium