reStructuredText citations page number support

Question

Does reStructuredText support page numbers in its citations somehow? I've only seen plain labels like [Test10]_ in examples so far, but not for example [Test10 p. 20]_.

I think this is quite important for scientific papers. You don't want to force a reader, who checks a source to read a whole book to find what you're referring to. Or even a whole paper for that matter. So it seems to me like there should be support for it, but I could not find it so far.

Answer 1

This is exactly what I was looking for :-)

You could try something like this:

.. footer:: page ###Page###

It also works with the directive .. header::

See :

• https://www.blog.pythonlibrary.org/2012/06/17/an-intro-to-rst2pdf-changing-restructured-text-into-pdfs-with-python/

• https://pythonhosted.org/linkdown/doc/rst/cheatsheet.html

Answer 2

I ended up writing my own parsers and converters for rst, which convert citations and internal links to raw-latex citations and hyperrefs. You can find the code in my GitHub repos. My build process for a PDF from rst now looks like this:

1. convert citations using my own parser
2. convert internal links using my own parser
3. use pandoc to convert to latex
4. use latexmk to compile a pdf

I have a bash script for running these steps in sequence, but it is specific to my directory structure.

Hope it will be helpful for people. Maybe some day Pandoc will take care of all of this (I hope so.)