Between markdown and a few more obscure text shorthands, I somehow failed to ever learn about rst. reStructured Text has apparently been around a while, I just never took note.
As must be the case when a shorthand comes along, there are tools — a lot of tools — to convert rst to something else. I’m going to pick on only one — rst2pdf — but you can scrape around and look for some others.
As you can see, the output is quite clean, and the rst file is actually quite reasonable. There are plenty of times when I get frustrated and want to give markdown a beatdown, but rst2pdf seemed to handle most of the spotty issues without undue complaint.
I’ll be honest, I’m definitely no rst expert, and it saddens me to think that I haven’t really got any use for it except to show off here.
I am sure there are at least one or two more knowledgeable souls out there who can offer advice. For now I’ll continue to make up fake PDFs of this site, just for kicks. 😕
Inconsolation 
Just so you know why you should keep rst in mind even if you don’t write. Every office suit and most word procesors opens rst files. It’s the only way to send a document to someone and be sure s/he will be able to open it without a hitch even if s/he still uses w98 and WordPad.
That’s a good thing to know. I’ll try this later and see how it works. Thanks. 😉
Ah, okay, sorry. I was thinking on RTF, which obviously is not the same because it has a different name but sometimes I’m a bit dense. Still, RTF is awesome. Sorry again, man.