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One of the biggest misses for asciidoc is that it's core libraries are ruby only. The javascript renderers are autogenerated and unmaintained. This is also the

One of the biggest misses for asciidoc is that it's core libraries are ruby only. The javascript renderers are autogenerated and unmaintained. This is also the reason why community uptake for asciidoc has been hard. Fundamentally we do not have any pastebin or hackmd for asciidoc.. because it is hard to build for it. Pastebin and hackmd have consistently refused to include asciidoc. Momentum exists in the JAMSTACK space. Yet Gatsby and Nextjs play with markdown variants (MDX?) for markup. There are no asciidoc examples even in their repos . Asciidoc is undoubtedly superior to markdown..and more importantly, is a well defined standard. But unless the core team engages with the ecosystem more, this is DOA.

moonchild 6y ago
Huh? The core/reference implementation was python-only. (Was python2-only for a while, actually--I helped change that.) Asciidoctor (ruby) is a prominent implementation, granted, but afaik there are quite a few other implementations in other languages.
- sandGorgon 6y ago
  I'm talking about where the momentum is. Sure I can use asciidoctor (through docker,etc)..but what I'm really talking about is the adoption in the wider ecosystem. Which needs javascript, tooling, support,etc. Asciidoc as a community has not gone down that path.
  - SevereOverfl0w 6y ago
    You might be interested in asciidoctor.js and asciidoctorj
- mbeex 6y ago
  Not so much. And the original Python variant is a) slowly growing old in features, b) the Python3 variants are unfinished and are missing support. I don't remember exactly in what respect, but I evaluated things some months ago and reluctantly installed the ruby gem of AsciiDoctor. I would have prefered a Python solution very much in my Python-driven environment. Also, a 'pip install asciidoc' would be very welcome.
  - mbeex 6y ago
    > the Python3 variants are unfinished and are missing support. I stand corrected: https://asciidoc.org/CHANGELOG.html https://asciidoc.org/CHANGELOG.html (Version 9.0.0 (2020-06-02))
baby 6y ago
Can confirm. I’m writing my book in asciidoc and the tools are shit.
- GordonS 6y ago
  Have you tried AsciiDocFx? I've used it to write technical manuals and quite like it.
- jaekash 6y ago
  Would like to know what you are trying to do and what tools are not working for you, I have found the tools to be quite nice to work with.
  - baby 6y ago
    It has just been a nightmare to handle different versions, and themes and plugins, and make latex equations work for rendering in pdf.
galacticdessert 6y ago
I share your comment on tooling. At my former job we developed a documentation portal with Antora and AsciiDoc https://antora.org/ https://antora.org/ . I say developed rather than deployed as we ended up adding a ton of extra features to Antora (think authentication, authorizations, image previews, full-text search as you type, etc.). Antora is quite nice and writing documentation in AsciiDoc was very enjoyable, but it was very clear how the JS implementation of AsciiDoctor was not on par with the Ruby one. We had multiple cases where the JS version would handle documents differently, or support a different feature set than the asciidoctor-cli. Moreover, the build times for the portal were extremely long (like 20-30 minutes for ~100 pages) To write documents we all used VS Code + the Firefox/Chrome ASciDoctor preview plugin, and that worked much better than AsciiDocFx. Going back I would probably suggest to look into other platforms, as the benefits of AsciiDoc are smaller than the amount of tooling frustrations.

moonchild 6y ago

Huh? The core/reference implementation was python-only. (Was python2-only for a while, actually--I helped change that.) Asciidoctor (ruby) is a prominent implementation, granted, but afaik there are quite a few other implementations in other languages.

sandGorgon 6y ago
I'm talking about where the momentum is. Sure I can use asciidoctor (through docker,etc)..but what I'm really talking about is the adoption in the wider ecosystem. Which needs javascript, tooling, support,etc. Asciidoc as a community has not gone down that path.
- SevereOverfl0w 6y ago
  You might be interested in asciidoctor.js and asciidoctorj
mbeex 6y ago
Not so much. And the original Python variant is a) slowly growing old in features, b) the Python3 variants are unfinished and are missing support. I don't remember exactly in what respect, but I evaluated things some months ago and reluctantly installed the ruby gem of AsciiDoctor. I would have prefered a Python solution very much in my Python-driven environment. Also, a 'pip install asciidoc' would be very welcome.
- mbeex 6y ago
  > the Python3 variants are unfinished and are missing support. I stand corrected: https://asciidoc.org/CHANGELOG.html https://asciidoc.org/CHANGELOG.html (Version 9.0.0 (2020-06-02))

baby 6y ago

Can confirm. I’m writing my book in asciidoc and the tools are shit.

GordonS 6y ago
Have you tried AsciiDocFx? I've used it to write technical manuals and quite like it.
jaekash 6y ago
Would like to know what you are trying to do and what tools are not working for you, I have found the tools to be quite nice to work with.
- baby 6y ago
  It has just been a nightmare to handle different versions, and themes and plugins, and make latex equations work for rendering in pdf.

galacticdessert 6y ago

I share your comment on tooling. At my former job we developed a documentation portal with Antora and AsciiDoc https://antora.org/ https://antora.org/ . I say developed rather than deployed as we ended up adding a ton of extra features to Antora (think authentication, authorizations, image previews, full-text search as you type, etc.). Antora is quite nice and writing documentation in AsciiDoc was very enjoyable, but it was very clear how the JS implementation of AsciiDoctor was not on par with the Ruby one. We had multiple cases where the JS version would handle documents differently, or support a different feature set than the asciidoctor-cli. Moreover, the build times for the portal were extremely long (like 20-30 minutes for ~100 pages) To write documents we all used VS Code + the Firefox/Chrome ASciDoctor preview plugin, and that worked much better than AsciiDocFx. Going back I would probably suggest to look into other platforms, as the benefits of AsciiDoc are smaller than the amount of tooling frustrations.