3 ms·

How is asciidoc compared to sphinx? I've found sphinx really good so far.

invalidname 3y ago
I'm not a Python guy so never worked with Sphinx and never really heard of anyone using it for something like a book. It looks like it suffers from the same problems that MD suffers from. Building a markup language is really easy. That's why we have so many and multiple independent implementations of markdown. The problem is that last mile to get production and mostly printing right. That's super hard and even asciidoctor doesn't get it perfectly. These Manning does use asciidoc for writing, it's great for that. But when you need to create a book they move it to docbook and then typeset using the traditional typesetting programs. Despite all the work it's 95% of the way for the sublime book experience. I'd say every other alternative is 90% of the way at best. To get a sense of what you need to do to create a professional book without that typesetting work check out this post https://medium.com/sketch-app-sources/using-sketch-and-asciidoc-to-generate-a-professional-tech-book-ef5b5d8dd410 https://medium.com/sketch-app-sources/using-sketch-and-ascii...
MilStdJunkie 3y ago
Asciidoc is a lightweight markup language, Sphinx is a document processor. I imagine what you're primarily asking is "how does Asciidoc compare to ReStructuredText?". ReStructuredText has a ton of functionality, but it slips behind Asciidoc in a few areas. On paper, we passed by RsT because leadership didn't like the Python-forward tooling and high setup workload . . but we had other reasons on the publications side of things: less XML interoperability, worse print options, worse tables, weirder directives, syntax inconsistencies, no established spec or working group (at the time). Being built on DocBook is a great insurance policy for Asciidoc, as DocBook has been around approximately forever and opens lots of doors to other XML specifications via XSL or something more sane.

I'm not a Python guy so never worked with Sphinx and never really heard of anyone using it for something like a book. It looks like it suffers from the same problems that MD suffers from. Building a markup language is really easy. That's why we have so many and multiple independent implementations of markdown. The problem is that last mile to get production and mostly printing right. That's super hard and even asciidoctor doesn't get it perfectly. These Manning does use asciidoc for writing, it's great for that. But when you need to create a book they move it to docbook and then typeset using the traditional typesetting programs. Despite all the work it's 95% of the way for the sublime book experience. I'd say every other alternative is 90% of the way at best. To get a sense of what you need to do to create a professional book without that typesetting work check out this post https://medium.com/sketch-app-sources/using-sketch-and-asciidoc-to-generate-a-professional-tech-book-ef5b5d8dd410 https://medium.com/sketch-app-sources/using-sketch-and-ascii...

MilStdJunkie 3y ago

Asciidoc is a lightweight markup language, Sphinx is a document processor. I imagine what you're primarily asking is "how does Asciidoc compare to ReStructuredText?". ReStructuredText has a ton of functionality, but it slips behind Asciidoc in a few areas. On paper, we passed by RsT because leadership didn't like the Python-forward tooling and high setup workload . . but we had other reasons on the publications side of things: less XML interoperability, worse print options, worse tables, weirder directives, syntax inconsistencies, no established spec or working group (at the time). Being built on DocBook is a great insurance policy for Asciidoc, as DocBook has been around approximately forever and opens lots of doors to other XML specifications via XSL or something more sane.