StructuredText rules, from the Zope source:

"Structured text is text that uses indentation and simple symbology to indicate the structure of a document.

A structured string consists of a sequence of paragraphs separated by one or more blank lines. Each paragraph has a level which is defined as the minimum indentation of the paragraph. A paragraph is a sub-paragraph of another paragraph if the other paragraph is the last preceding paragraph that has a lower level.

Special symbology is used to indicate special constructs:

• A single-line paragraph whose immediately succeeding paragraphs are lower level is treated as a header.
• A paragraph that begins with a '-', *, or o is treated as an unordered list (bullet) element.
• A paragraph that begins with a sequence of digits followed by a white-space character is treated as an ordered list element.
• A paragraph that begins with a sequence of sequences, where each sequence is a sequence of digits or a sequence of letters followed by a period, is treated as an ordered list element.
• A paragraph with a first line that contains some text, followed by some white-space and -- is treated as a descriptive list element. The leading text is treated as the element title.
• Sub-paragraphs of a paragraph that ends in the word example or the word examples, or :: is treated as example code and is output as is:

      <table border=0>
        <tr>
          <td> Foo 
      </table>
  

• Text enclosed single quotes (with white-space to the left of the first quote and whitespace or puctuation to the right of the second quote) is treated as example code.

  For example: <dtml-var foo>.

• Text surrounded by * characters (with white-space to the left of the first * and whitespace or puctuation to the right of the second *) is emphasized.
• Text surrounded by ** characters (with white-space to the left of the first ** and whitespace or puctuation to the right of the second **) is made strong.
• Text surrounded by _ underscore characters (with whitespace to the left and whitespace or punctuation to the right) is made underlined.
• Text encloded by double quotes followed by a colon, a URL, and concluded by punctuation plus white space, or just white space, is treated as a hyper link.

  For example, "Zope":http://www.zope.org/ is interpreted as Zope

  Note: This works for relative as well as absolute URLs.

• Text enclosed by double quotes followed by a comma, one or more spaces, an absolute URL and concluded by punctuation plus white space, or just white space, is treated as a hyper link.

  For example: "mail me", mailto:amos@digicool.com is interpreted as mail me

• Text enclosed in brackets which consists only of letters, digits, underscores and dashes is treated as hyper links within the document.

  For example: "As demonstrated by Smith [12] this technique ..."

  Is interpreted as: "As demonstrated by Smith [12] this technique"

  Together with the next rule this allows easy coding of references or end notes.

• Text enclosed in brackets which is preceded by the start of a line, two periods and a space is treated as a named link. For example:

  .. [12] "Effective Techniques" Smith, Joe ...

  Is interpreted as

[12] "Effective Techniques" Smith, Joe ...

Note: see the <A NAME="12"> in the HTML source.

Together with the previous rule this allows easy coding of references or end notes.