[HN Gopher] Asciidoctor: A fast text processor and publishing to...
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       Asciidoctor: A fast text processor and publishing toolchain
        
       Author : Tomte
       Score  : 38 points
       Date   : 2024-09-06 15:10 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (asciidoctor.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (asciidoctor.org)
        
       | Diti wrote:
       | AsciiDoc is a pretty nice plaintext format with a rich offer of
       | components.
       | 
       | I wish it was more widely supported. Unfortunately, the only
       | worthy implementation is in Ruby (AsciiDoctor), which is what all
       | the other projects (in Java, Python) use.
       | 
       | AsciiDoc would see more adoption, I think, if independent
       | implementations existed in other languages.
        
         | bobbylarrybobby wrote:
         | The JavaScript version is an automatic translation of the ruby
         | code and also works great (and of course can be used in a
         | browser context). It is obviously not independent though
        
         | kamma4434 wrote:
         | As Ruby is very brittle when you move between OS we use jruby
         | with gradle - all plugins included. One day I should make it
         | into a native executable with Graal.
         | 
         | Current workplace maintains a good amount of tech docs written
         | in AsciiDoc that have been written over approx 20 years, that
         | create PDF/ebooks and are published as a searchable online
         | version with Antora. It works pretty well.
        
       | abdullahkhalids wrote:
       | Is there by any chance some variant of Jupyter that supports
       | asciidoc for the text formatting? If so, how difficult would it
       | be to replace Jupyter's marked.js renderer with asciidoctor?
        
       | RadiozRadioz wrote:
       | Better than Markdown, but I have trouble with muscle memory and
       | the ubiquity of Markdown. One of these days I'll switch. It's
       | similar to the QWERTY/Dvorak problem.
        
       | klauserc wrote:
       | I prefer Asciidoc over markdown for _documents_ where chapters,
       | cross references, call outs, etc are valuable. For things that
       | one might want to turn into a PDF.
       | 
       | The tooling is a bit of a pain, but the Java world has pretty
       | good integration (gradle, intellij)
        
       | tapirl wrote:
       | AsciiDoc is a feature-rich markup language. It's great. But I
       | have two complaints:
       | 
       | 1. Its readability is not very good. There is too much non-
       | content text for me.
       | 
       | 2. The grammar set is not small and natural.
        
       | skwee357 wrote:
       | I successfully used AsciiDoc and AsciiDoctor to write 2 books
       | [0].
       | 
       | I found it better suit for long form content than, say, markdown,
       | due to the fact it has more language grammar for things like
       | chapter, admonitions, etc.
       | 
       | [0] https://yieldcode.blog/post/asciidoc-for-book-writing/
        
       | toastal wrote:
       | I've in recent years started to favor reStructuredText over
       | AsciiDoc for three reasons. 1) Docutils's output in like 95%
       | good, semantic HTML where Asciidoctor has a lot of issues (I
       | would note that non-Docutils is often bad, second-class & reliant
       | on what Markdown outputs for 'compatibility' (meaning less
       | features for you)) 2) the features difference between the two I
       | prefer the rST set (such as abbreviations) 3) the spec seems so
       | complicated Pandoc can't realistically have a reader, just a
       | writer & pretty much the Ruby-based Asciidoctor application ends
       | up _being_ the AsciiDoc specification.
       | 
       | That said, I would choose AsciiDoc every single day without
       | hesitation over Markdown the minute you are talking about
       | documentation or any sort of technical writing since Markdown is
       | far too feature poor & buying into one specific fork is locking
       | you into incompatibility & other headaches/compromises.
        
       | ctenb wrote:
       | I switched from pandoc markdown to asciidoc for writing technical
       | blog posts, but switched back after a year due to the fact that
       | pandoc is easier to setup and tweak with plugins
        
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