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Is there any reason for why you’re not considering AsciiDoc?

by Diti 3y ago

0cf8612b2e1e 3y ago
Seconding this. Asciidoc was created to be a simple mapping to DocBook - which was specifically designed for writing books. It should be able to handle everything you need, but if there is some esoteric requirement, you can write your own processor. Then again, content is king. Write it on napkins if you must. When complete, you can spend two days to transcribe to whatever format the publisher requires.
- graemep 3y ago
  That sounds like what I need. I have been using Latex (which I find distracting) and restructured text (which I am less familiar with at the moment) with Sphinx. How does Asciidoc compare to restructured text? Both were intended for writing documentation so are similar in capabilities?
mapreduce 3y ago
No such reason. I'm willing to try out AsciiDoc. I mean I did not try AsciiDoc until now because there are so many choices of input formats and the ones I've tried so far have been disappointing one way or the other. I talked about Org-mode rendering broken in edge cases. Same with Latex too. I see Pandoc has first-class support for its own Pandoc Markdown format. But the support for all other input formats seem patchy. If you think Pandoc has good support for AsciiDoc without any edge case issues, I'll be most certainly trying it out.
- bobbylarrybobby 3y ago
  Pandoc has no support for asciidoctor as an input format — you're expected to just use asciidoctor itself to convert adoc files (and there's no reason not to). Asciidoctor can do HTML and PDF, not sure about EPUB though.
__mharrison__ 3y ago
I've written a book in asciidoc using proprietary tooling. It was a fine experience. However, the open source tooling doesn't support what I need for a physical book, so I chose to use pandoc and markdown instead mostly for to the market size of markdown. (I previously wrote my own tool chain for rst to latex and epub, so I'm week seats of what features are needed to make digital and physical books. I was sick of using a format that had limited tooling while the world had moved on to markdown.)

Is there any reason for why you’re not considering AsciiDoc?

by Diti 3y ago

Is there any reason for why you’re not considering AsciiDoc?

Seconding this. Asciidoc was created to be a simple mapping to DocBook - which was specifically designed for writing books. It should be able to handle everything you need, but if there is some esoteric requirement, you can write your own processor. Then again, content is king. Write it on napkins if you must. When complete, you can spend two days to transcribe to whatever format the publisher requires.

graemep 3y ago
That sounds like what I need. I have been using Latex (which I find distracting) and restructured text (which I am less familiar with at the moment) with Sphinx. How does Asciidoc compare to restructured text? Both were intended for writing documentation so are similar in capabilities?

mapreduce 3y ago

No such reason. I'm willing to try out AsciiDoc. I mean I did not try AsciiDoc until now because there are so many choices of input formats and the ones I've tried so far have been disappointing one way or the other. I talked about Org-mode rendering broken in edge cases. Same with Latex too. I see Pandoc has first-class support for its own Pandoc Markdown format. But the support for all other input formats seem patchy. If you think Pandoc has good support for AsciiDoc without any edge case issues, I'll be most certainly trying it out.

bobbylarrybobby 3y ago
Pandoc has no support for asciidoctor as an input format — you're expected to just use asciidoctor itself to convert adoc files (and there's no reason not to). Asciidoctor can do HTML and PDF, not sure about EPUB though.

__mharrison__ 3y ago

I've written a book in asciidoc using proprietary tooling. It was a fine experience. However, the open source tooling doesn't support what I need for a physical book, so I chose to use pandoc and markdown instead mostly for to the market size of markdown. (I previously wrote my own tool chain for rst to latex and epub, so I'm week seats of what features are needed to make digital and physical books. I was sick of using a format that had limited tooling while the world had moved on to markdown.)