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Thanks for the reminder about Asciidoc! A few years ago I dug into various markup languages looking for a better way to draft legal documents. Asciidoc was the

Thanks for the reminder about Asciidoc! A few years ago I dug into various markup languages looking for a better way to draft legal documents. Asciidoc was the best balance of power & simplicity. Unfortunately the ecosystem was pretty weak. In subsequent years there has been an effort to standardize the spec, which should unlock better tooling. I need to check in on that…

pbronez 2y ago
They’re still working on the spec. Last release was five months ago. So, slow progress continues. https://gitlab.eclipse.org/eclipse/asciidoc-lang/asciidoc-la https://gitlab.eclipse.org/eclipse/asciidoc-lang/asciidoc-la... Here are the minutes from the last working group meeting, back in Feb. looks like they’ll meet again in September https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/1eqB2w5pungP2vxiF_DeM4hlOmklor9h_WL_sfmd6L0U/mobilebasic https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/1eqB2w5pungP2vxiF_DeM...
tcfhgj 2y ago
Have you checked out Typst? I have tried ASCII doc and haven't really enjoyed it. Typst on the other hand is simple, fast, powerful and ergonomic at the same time.
- KingMob 2y ago
  At a glance, Typst looks more like a competitor to Latex, not Markdown/Asciidoc/rST.
  - setopt 2y ago
    Typst is trying to take on LaTeX: high-quality PDF output, equation typesetting, citation and reference systems, programmability, etc. But if you look closer, the actual syntax of Typst is clearly a mix of MarkDown and AsciiDoc (e.g. code blocks and lists work like MarkDown, while headers work like AsciiDoc, and I think the math syntax is to some degree inspired by AsciiMath from the AsciiDoc ecosystem). As someone who mainly uses MarkDown to author PDFs, I find Typst to be a clear competitor to Markdown/AsciiDoc/Org as well as TeX. I think they're working on basic Typst support for Pandoc, in which case you might soon be able to generate HTML with it too.
    - stephenr 2y ago
      What's your markdown to pdf tool(s) of choice?
      - setopt 2y ago
        The king in this space is Pandoc. It supports most things you might need in "serious" documents: figures, tables, equations, references, citations, etc. You can even customize the TeX export template if you need more control over the output. And if you need to later, you can easily re-export the same document to TeX, DOCX, or HTML. Lately, I've also been using Quarto a bit. The default export is HTML but it also supports PDF. It's nice if you're into "literate programming", where you write code blocks (e.g. Python snippets) in a MarkDown file, and those code blocks are automatically used to generate figures, tables, etc. in your MarkDown file on export. If you want something that "just works" and are not averse to commercial apps, I can recommend giving "iA Writer" a shot. It has a built-in preview and export solution that is lightning fast and has good support for equations. But I wouldn't use its export for anything important, as the output is clearly draft quality, and the MarkDown support lacks features like citations. (Though it supports footnotes, so for informal documents you can abuse that for citations.)
- pbronez 2y ago
  Yes, but it's probably worth another look as my use cases have shifted around. I'm 1000% not interested in signing up for their SaaS (corporate data security concerns) but I see that they have an open source CLI [0] so maybe I'll try that. Also, looks like they offer a self-hosted enterprise offering now, which is intriguing. My use cases include: - Drafting, reviewing and iterating over legal documents, especially contracts - Technical and business process documentation - Long-form, print-friendly report generation, including data visualization, tables and images [0] https://github.com/typst/typst https://github.com/typst/typst
  - setopt 2y ago
    The open-source CLI is indeed all you need. On Mac, I could just do `brew install typst` to get the compiler, and then run it on a local `*.typ` file. I'm sure there are packages available for most Linux distributions as well by now.

pbronez 2y ago

They’re still working on the spec. Last release was five months ago. So, slow progress continues. https://gitlab.eclipse.org/eclipse/asciidoc-lang/asciidoc-la https://gitlab.eclipse.org/eclipse/asciidoc-lang/asciidoc-la... Here are the minutes from the last working group meeting, back in Feb. looks like they’ll meet again in September https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/1eqB2w5pungP2vxiF_DeM4hlOmklor9h_WL_sfmd6L0U/mobilebasic https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/1eqB2w5pungP2vxiF_DeM...

tcfhgj 2y ago

Have you checked out Typst? I have tried ASCII doc and haven't really enjoyed it. Typst on the other hand is simple, fast, powerful and ergonomic at the same time.

KingMob 2y ago
At a glance, Typst looks more like a competitor to Latex, not Markdown/Asciidoc/rST.
- setopt 2y ago
  Typst is trying to take on LaTeX: high-quality PDF output, equation typesetting, citation and reference systems, programmability, etc. But if you look closer, the actual syntax of Typst is clearly a mix of MarkDown and AsciiDoc (e.g. code blocks and lists work like MarkDown, while headers work like AsciiDoc, and I think the math syntax is to some degree inspired by AsciiMath from the AsciiDoc ecosystem). As someone who mainly uses MarkDown to author PDFs, I find Typst to be a clear competitor to Markdown/AsciiDoc/Org as well as TeX. I think they're working on basic Typst support for Pandoc, in which case you might soon be able to generate HTML with it too.
  - stephenr 2y ago
    What's your markdown to pdf tool(s) of choice?
    - setopt 2y ago
      The king in this space is Pandoc. It supports most things you might need in "serious" documents: figures, tables, equations, references, citations, etc. You can even customize the TeX export template if you need more control over the output. And if you need to later, you can easily re-export the same document to TeX, DOCX, or HTML. Lately, I've also been using Quarto a bit. The default export is HTML but it also supports PDF. It's nice if you're into "literate programming", where you write code blocks (e.g. Python snippets) in a MarkDown file, and those code blocks are automatically used to generate figures, tables, etc. in your MarkDown file on export. If you want something that "just works" and are not averse to commercial apps, I can recommend giving "iA Writer" a shot. It has a built-in preview and export solution that is lightning fast and has good support for equations. But I wouldn't use its export for anything important, as the output is clearly draft quality, and the MarkDown support lacks features like citations. (Though it supports footnotes, so for informal documents you can abuse that for citations.)
pbronez 2y ago
Yes, but it's probably worth another look as my use cases have shifted around. I'm 1000% not interested in signing up for their SaaS (corporate data security concerns) but I see that they have an open source CLI [0] so maybe I'll try that. Also, looks like they offer a self-hosted enterprise offering now, which is intriguing. My use cases include: - Drafting, reviewing and iterating over legal documents, especially contracts - Technical and business process documentation - Long-form, print-friendly report generation, including data visualization, tables and images [0] https://github.com/typst/typst https://github.com/typst/typst
- setopt 2y ago
  The open-source CLI is indeed all you need. On Mac, I could just do `brew install typst` to get the compiler, and then run it on a local `*.typ` file. I'm sure there are packages available for most Linux distributions as well by now.