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I wish Asciidoc was more popular

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Re: I wish Asciidoc was more popular

#61

Post by baby »

Tomte wrote: post #6
hobo_mark wrote: post #5

I write all my professional docs in AsciiDoc (even made a tool to pull AsciiDoc comments out of the code and into various documents), but always disliked having to pull ruby into my toolchain. Is the Python3 asciidoc (any of the several that have sprung up) good enough to replace asciidoctor nowadays?

Use AsciiDoctorJ. Under the hood it's JRuby, but as a user you won't really notice, it's just a Java program.

You're proposing a Java solution to someone not happy with a Ruby solution, that seems backward.

Re: I wish Asciidoc was more popular

#62

Post by [deleted] »

baby wrote: post #60

I used asciidoc to write a book with Manning, and what I have to say is that I'm personally not a fan. The main reason is the tooling in ruby. Maybe if asciidoc was more popular than it would have more implementations in more languages, but it's really tedious to work with it in the current situation IMO. The other thing is that, it was not easy to work with LaTeX in asciidoc last time I was doing it. Smaller issues:…

[deleted]

Re: I wish Asciidoc was more popular

#63

Post by [deleted] »

zh3 wrote: post #17

Main killer for me - admittedly because I like sharp tools, and it used to claim to be 'lightweight': 'apt install asciidoc' (and I had to delete most of it, because - for the first time ever - I got an HN message about "comment too long"):- Reading package lists... Building dependency tree... Reading state information... The following additional packages will be installed: asciidoc-base asciidoc-common asciidoc-dbla…

[deleted]

Re: I wish Asciidoc was more popular

#64

Post by type0 »

hobo_mark wrote: post #8
Tomte wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Use AsciiDoctorJ. Under the hood it's JRuby, but as a user you won't really notice, it's just a Java program.

Having to download a JRE is not any better than having to pull Ruby from the RH Software Collections, meanwhile Python is already there...

There's https://github.com/asciidoctor/asciidoctor.js

Re: I wish Asciidoc was more popular

#67

Post by kitsunesoba »

Freak_NL wrote: post #28

Aside from the merits of Markdown and Asciidoc, Asciidoc has a name that doesn't help. Depending on the (natural) language, ASCII (the encoding, that is) annoys anything from a small percentage of users (e.g., English, Esperanto), to many people (e.g, Dutch, German, French), to almost everyone (anything that doesn't use Latin characters). In the context of a markup language intended for structuring normal text its na…

> Asciidoc has a name that doesn't help.

Along with the notion of obsolescence one might derive from it, it's also not particularly sticky/memorable. It might sound silly but I think snappiness or lack thereof has an impact on rate of adoption, because for people to use things they have to first remember them.

Re: I wish Asciidoc was more popular

#68

Post by TheRealPomax »

mkesper wrote: post #29
preommr wrote: post #21

Everything in that article is why I don't like asciidoc. I think a lot of documentation should be absolute dead simple - no macros and complex behavior. It should just work. Markdown is great for that.

Not having includes in markdown is a real bummer, though.

You get links, if you need more than that you're probably overcomplicating your documentation. Transclusion might sound nice, but now your docs have depedencies and they become harder to send, harder to host, and harder to edit (is this edit in this transcluded file going to work for every other file that includes it?). Then someone goes "I use it for templating" and now you have a CMS. It's a slippery slop that markdown sidesteps by going "no. You get links. If you need more than links, you're probably overcomplicating your documentation".

Re: I wish Asciidoc was more popular

#70

Post by pessimizer »

I wish Asciidoc were less complicated, or at least had an official subset that cuts out most of it and leaves something that can be learned from a single-side of a piece of paper. I'm having trouble figuring out why I shouldn't use CSS if I'm going to use something this complicated and ultimately this close to CSS.
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