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Sphinx vs Docutils: catalog facts
Sphinx	Docutils
Free Free and open source under the BSD 2-Clause licence.	Free Free and open source.
Windows, macOS, Linux, Command line	Windows, macOS, Linux, Command line
Strong cross-referencing, including across projects Outputs HTML, PDF via LaTeX, ePub and Texinfo	Reference implementation of reStructuredText Outputs HTML, LaTeX, man pages, OpenDocument and XML
reStructuredText has a learning curve Requires a Python environment	reStructuredText is less widely known than Markdown Support is mainly through mailing lists
Downloadable app	Downloadable app
Open source	Open source
License: BSD-2-Clause	License: Public domain, BSD-2-Clause, GPL-3.0-or-later and Python-2.0 (mixed)
No account needed	No account needed
Works offline	Works offline
Official website Full listing and sources Checked October 1, 2026	Official website Full listing and sources Checked October 1, 2026

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