Re: rst2pdf (was [PATCH v2] docs: sphinx-pre-install: warn about unsupported Docutils versions)

[Mauro Carvalho Chehab <mchehab+huawei@kernel.org>]

On Tue, 15 Sep 2026 08:35:11 -0600
Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net> wrote:

> Mauro Carvalho Chehab <mchehab+huawei@kernel.org> writes:
> 
> > On a separate but related issue, has anyone tried to use rst2pdf
> > lately (https://github.com/rst2pdf/rst2pdf)?  
> 
> I have a branch sitting around that, on occasion, I dust off to see how
> it works; every time, rst2pdf crashes and burns.  I've long wanted to
> find some time to figure out what's going on and try to fix it but
> ... well, we know that story by now ...
> 
> It would be *wonderful* if we could us it and short the LaTeX toolchain
> out entirely.

If someone has spare tokens, perhaps detecting the issues could be
delegated to some LLM agent that would try to address them, generating
enough feedback to have something to submit back to rst2pdf maintainers.

As this is basically a transformation problem (from rst vocabulary to pdf
vocabulary), I suspect it won't take much LLM time to discover the main 
issues. Perhaps even small model like ornith-1.5-9B could be enough to
deal with it.


Thanks,
Mauro