otherdoc.adoc

AsciiDoc Home Page

{revdate}: AsciiDoc {revnumber} Released

Read the CHANGELOG for release highlights and a full list of all additions, changes and bug fixes. Changes are documented in the updated User Guide. See the Installation page for downloads and and installation instructions.

Stuart Rackham

Introduction

AsciiDoc is a text document format for writing notes, documentation, articles, books, ebooks, slideshows, web pages, man pages and blogs. AsciiDoc files can be translated to many formats including HTML, PDF, EPUB, man page.

AsciiDoc is highly configurable: both the AsciiDoc source file syntax and the backend output markups (which can be almost any type of SGML/XML markup) can be customized and extended by the user.

AsciiDoc is free software and is licenced under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2 (GPLv2).

Tip	The pages you are reading were written using AsciiDoc, to view the corresponding AsciiDoc source click on the Page Source menu item in the left hand margin.

Overview and Examples

You write an AsciiDoc document the same way you would write a normal text document, there are no markup tags or weird format notations. AsciiDoc files are designed to be viewed, edited and printed directly or translated to other presentation formats using the asciidoc(1) command.

The asciidoc(1) command translates AsciiDoc files to HTML, XHTML and DocBook markups. DocBook can be post-processed to presentation formats such as HTML, PDF, EPUB, DVI, LaTeX, roff, and Postscript using readily available Open Source tools.

Example Articles

• This XHTML version of the AsciiDoc User Guide was generated by AsciiDoc from this AsciiDoc file.

• Here’s the same document created by first generating DocBook markup using AsciiDoc and then converting the DocBook markup to HTML using DocBook XSL Stylesheets.

• The User Guide again, this time a chunked version.

• AsciiDoc generated this stand-alone HTML file containing embedded CSS, JavaScript and images from this AsciiDoc article template with this command:

  asciidoc -a data-uri -a icons -a toc -a max-width=55em article.txt

• The same AsciiDoc article template generated this HTML 5 (the toc2 attribute puts a table of contents in the left margin) from this command:

  asciidoc -b html5 -a icons -a toc2 -a theme=flask article.txt

• The same AsciiDoc article template produced this HTML file and this PDF file via DocBook markup generated by AsciiDoc.

Example Books

AsciiDoc markup supports all the standard DocBook frontmatter and backmatter sections (dedication, preface, bibliography, glossary, index, colophon) plus footnotes and index entries.

• This AsciiDoc book produced this HTML file using the DocBook XSL Stylesheets.

• The PDF formatted AsciiDoc User Guide was generated from asciidoc(1) DocBook output.

• The EPUB formatted AsciiDoc User Guide was generated using a2x.

• This EPUB formatted book skeleton was generated using a2x.

• This multi-part AsciiDoc book produced this HTML file using the DocBook XSL Stylesheets.

Example UNIX Man Pages

HTML formatted AsciiDoc man pages with stylesheets and without stylesheets were generated by AsciiDoc from this file.

This roff formatted man page was generated from asciidoc(1) DocBook output using xsltproc(1) and DocBook XSL Stylesheets.

Example Slideshows

The Slidy backend generates HTML slideshows that can be viewed in any web browser. What’s nice is that you can create completely self contained slideshows including embedded images.

• Here is the slidy backend documentation slideshow and here is it’s AsciiDoc source.

• An example slidy slideshow and the AsciiDoc source.

Example Web Site

The AsciiDoc website is included in the AsciiDoc distribution (in ./examples/website/) as an example website built using AsciiDoc. See ./examples/website/README-website.txt.

More examples

• See below: Documents written using AsciiDoc.

• Example Tables.

eBook Publication

The two most popular open eBook formats are EPUB and PDF. The AsciiDoc a2x toolchain wrapper makes it easy to publish EPUB and PDF eBooks with AsciiDoc. See also example books and AsciiDoc EPUB Notes).

Blogpost weblog client

blogpost is a command-line weblog client for publishing AsciiDoc documents to WordPress blog hosts. It creates and updates weblog posts and pages directly from AsciiDoc source documents.

Source code highlighter

AsciiDoc includes a source code highlighter filter that uses GNU source-highlight to highlight HTML outputs. You also have the option of using the Pygments highlighter.

Mathematical Formulae

You can include mathematical formulae in AsciiDoc XHTML documents using ASCIIMathML or LaTeXMathML notation.

The AsciiDoc LaTeX filter translates LaTeX source to a PNG image that is automatically inserted into the AsciiDoc output documents.

AsciiDoc also has latexmath macros for DocBook outputs — they are documented in this PDF file and can be used in AsciiDoc documents processed by dblatex(1).

Editor Support

• An AsciiDoc syntax highlighter for the Vim text editor is included in the AsciiDoc distribution (see the Vim Syntax Highlighter appendix in the AsciiDoc User Guide for details).

  

  Syntax highlighter screenshot

• Dag Wieers has implemented an alternative Vim syntax file for AsciiDoc which can be found here http://svn.rpmforge.net/svn/trunk/tools/asciidoc-vim/.

• David Avsajanishvili has written a source highlighter for AsciiDoc files for GtkSourceView (used by gedit and a number of other applications). The project is hosted here: https://launchpad.net/asciidoc-gtk-highlight

• AsciiDoc resources for the Emacs editor can be found on the AsciiDoc page at the Emacs Wiki.

• Christian Zuckschwerdt has written a TextMate bundle for AsciiDoc.

Try AsciiDoc on the Web

Andrew Koster has written a Web based application to interactively convert and display AsciiDoc source: http://andrewk.webfactional.com/asciidoc.php

External Resources and Applications

Here are resources that I know of, if you know of more drop me a line and I’ll add them to the list.

• Check the installation page for packaged versions of AsciiDoc.

• Alex Efros has written an HTML formatted AsciiDoc Cheatsheet using Asciidoc.

• Thomas Berker has written an AsciiDoc Cheatsheet in Open Document and PDF formats.

• The WikiMatrix website has an excellent web page that compares the various Wiki markup syntaxes. An interesting attempt at Wiki markup standardization is CREOLE.

• Franck Pommereau has written Asciidoctest, a program that doctests snippets of Python code within your Asciidoc documents.

• The ReMIPS project website has been built using AsciiDoc.

• Here are some DocBook XSL Stylesheets Notes.

• Karl Mowatt-Wilson has developed an ikiwiki plugin for AsciiDoc which he uses to render his website. The plugin is available here and there is some discussion of the ikiwiki integration here.

• Glenn Eychaner has reworked the Asciidoc plugin for ikiwiki that was created by Karl Mowson, the source can be downloaded from http://dl.dropbox.com/u/11256359/asciidoc.pm

• David Hajage has written an AsciiDoc package for the R Project (R is a free software environment for statistical computing). ascii is available on CRAN (just run install.package("ascii") from R). Briefly, ascii replaces R results in AsciiDoc document with AsciiDoc markup. More information and examples here: http://eusebe.github.com/ascii/.

• Pascal Rapaz has written a Python script to automate AsciiDoc website generation. You can find it at http://www.rapazp.ch/opensource/tools/asciidoc.html.

• Jared Henley has written AsciiDoc Website Builder. AsciiDoc Website Builder (awb) is a python program that automates the building of of a website written in AsciiDoc. All you need to write is the AsciiDoc source plus a few simple configuration files.

• Brad Adkins has written AsciiDocGen, a web site generation and deployment tool that allows you write your web site content in AsciiDoc. The AsciiDocGen web site is managed using AsciiDocGen.

• Filippo Negroni has developed a set of tools to facilitate literate programming using AsciiDoc. The set of tools is called eWEB.

• Ivo’s blog describes a ditaa filter for AsciiDoc which converts ASCII art into graphics.

• Gollum is a git-powered wiki, it supports various formats, including AsciiDoc.

• Gregory Romé has written an AsciiDoc plugin for the Redmine project management application.

• Paul Hsu has started a Chinese translation of the AsciiDoc User Guide.

• Dag Wieers has written UNOCONV. UNOCONV can export AsciiDoc outputs to OpenOffice export formats.

• Ed Keith has written Code Extractor, it extracts code snippets from source code files and inserts them into AsciiDoc documents.

• The JMI website hosts a number of extras for AsciiDoc and Slidy written by Jean-Michel Inglebert.

• Ryan Tomayko has written an number of themes for AsciiDoc along with a script for combining the CSS files into single CSS theme files for AsciiDoc embedded CSS documents.

• Ilya Portnov has written a document building system for AsciiDoc, here is short article in Russian describing it.

• Lex Trotman has written codiicsa, a program that converts DocBook to AsciiDoc.

• Qingping Hou has written an AsciiDoc backend for deck.js. deck.js is a JavaScript library for building modern HTML presentations (slideshows).

• The guys from O’Reilly Media have posted an XSL Stylesheet to github that converts DocBook to AsciiDoc.

• Lex Trotman has written flexndex, an index generator tool that be used with AsciiDoc.

• Michael Haberler has created a blockdiag filter for Asciidoc which embeds blockdiag images in AsciiDoc documents.

• Dan Allen has written a Bootstrap backend for AsciiDoc.

• Steven Boscarine has written Maven wrapper for AsciiDoc.

• Christian Goltz has written Shaape, an Ascii art to image converter for AsciiDoc.

• Eduardo Santana has written an Asciidoc Highlight for Notepad++.

• Geany 1.23 adds document structure support for AsciiDoc.

Please let me know if any of these links need updating.

Documents written using AsciiDoc

Here are some documents I know of, if you know of more drop me a line and I’ll add them to the list.

• The book Practical Unit Testing by Tomek Kaczanowski was written using Asciidoc.

• The book Programming iOS 4 by Matt Neuburg was written using AsciiDoc. Matt has written an article describing how he used AsciiDoc and other tools to write the book.

• The book Programming Scala by Dean Wampler and Alex Payne (O’Reilly) was written using Asciidoc.

• The fishR website has a number of book examples written using AsciiDoc.

• The Neo4j graph database project uses Asciidoc, and the output is published here: http://docs.neo4j.org/. The build process includes live tested source code snippets and is described here.

• Frugalware Linux uses AsciiDoc for documentation.

• Cherokee documentation.

• Henrik Maier produced this professional User manual using AsciiDoc: http://www.proconx.com/assets/files/products/modg100/UMMBRG300-1101.pdf

• Henrik also produced this folded single page brochure format example: http://www.proconx.com/assets/files/products/modg100/IGMBRG300-1101-up.pdf

  See this AsciiDoc discussion group thread for details.

• The Git User’s Manual.

• Git Magic
  http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~blynn/gitmagic/
  http://github.com/blynn/gitmagic/tree/1e5780f658962f8f9b01638059b27275cfda095c

• CouchDB: The Definitive Guide
  http://books.couchdb.org/relax/
  http://groups.google.com/group/asciidoc/browse_thread/thread/a60f67cbbaf862aa/d214bf7fa2d538c4?lnk=gst&q=book#d214bf7fa2d538c4

• Ramaze Manual
  http://book.ramaze.net/
  http://github.com/manveru/ramaze-book/tree/master

• Some documentation about git by Nico Schottelius (in German) http://nico.schotteli.us/papers/linux/git-firmen/.

• The KirbyBase for Ruby database management system manual.

• The *Nix Power Tools project uses AsciiDoc for documentation.

• The Battle for Wesnoth project uses AsciiDoc for its Manual in a number of different languages.

• Troy Hanson uses AsciiDoc to generate user guides for the tpl and uthash projects (the HTML versions have a customised contents sidebar).

• Leonid Volnitsky’s site is generated using AsciiDoc and includes Leonid’s matplotlib filter.

• WeeChat uses AsciiDoc for project documentation.

• Clansuite uses AsciiDoc for project documentation.

• The Freecell Solver program uses AsciiDoc for its distributed documentation.

• Eric Raymond’s AIVDM/AIVDO protocol decoding documentation is written using AsciiDoc.

• Dwight Schauer has written an LXC HOWTO in AsciiDoc.

• The Free Telephony Project website is generated using AsciiDoc.

• Warren Block has posted a number of articles written using AsciiDoc.

• The Waf project’s Waf Book is written using AsciiDoc, there is an HTML and a PDF version.

• The DiffKit project’s documentation and website have been written using Asciidoc.

• The Network UPS Tools project documentation is an example of a large documentation project written using AsciiDoc.

• Pacman, the Arch Linux package manager, has been documented using AsciiDoc.

• Suraj Kurapati has written a number of customized manuals for his Open Source projects using AsciiDoc:

  • http://snk.tuxfamily.org/lib/detest/

  • http://snk.tuxfamily.org/lib/ember/

  • http://snk.tuxfamily.org/lib/inochi/

  • http://snk.tuxfamily.org/lib/rumai/

• The CxxTest project (unit testing for C++ language) has written its User Guide using AsciiDoc.

Please let me know if any of these links need updating.

DocBook 5.0 Backend

Shlomi Fish has begun work on a DocBook 5.0 docbook50.conf backend configuration file, you can find it here. See also: http://groups.google.com/group/asciidoc/browse_thread/thread/4386c7cc053d51a9

LaTeX Backend

An experimental LaTeX backend was written for AsciiDoc in 2006 by Benjamin Klum. Benjamin did a superhuman job (I admit it, I didn’t think this was doable due to AsciiDoc’s SGML/XML bias). Owning to to other commitments, Benjamin was unable to maintain this backend. Here’s Benjamin’s original documentation. Incompatibilities introduced after AsciiDoc 8.2.7 broke the LaTeX backend.

In 2009 Geoff Eddy stepped up and updated the LaTeX backend, thanks to Geoff’s efforts it now works with AsciiDoc 8.4.3. Geoff’s updated latex.conf file shipped with AsciiDoc version 8.4.4. The backend still has limitations and remains experimental (see Geoff’s notes).

It’s probably also worth pointing out that LaTeX output can be generated by passing AsciiDoc generated DocBook through dblatex(1).

Patches and bug reports

Patches and bug reports are are encouraged, but please try to follow these guidelines:

• Post bug reports and patches to the asciidoc discussion list, this keeps things transparent and gives everyone a chance to comment.

• The email subject line should be a specific and concise topic summary. Commonly accepted subject line prefixes such as [ANN], [PATCH] and [SOLVED] are good.

Bug reports

• When reporting problems please illustrate the problem with the smallest possible example that replicates the issue (and please test your example before posting). This technique will also help to eliminate red herrings prior to posting.

• Paste the commands that you executed along with any relevant outputs.

• Include the version of AsciiDoc and the platform you’re running it on.

• If you can program please consider writing a patch to fix the problem.

Patches

• Keep patches small and atomic (one issue per patch) — no patch bombs.

• If possible test your patch against the current trunk.

• If your patch adds or modifies functionality include a short example that illustrates the changes.

• Send patches in diff -u format, inline inside the mail message is usually best; if it is a very long patch then send it as an attachment.

• Include documentation updates if you’re up to it; otherwise insert TODO comments at relevant places in the documentation.