AsciiDoc is a lightweight markup language for writing notes, documentation, articles, books, ebooks, slideshows, web pages, man pages and blogs. It is a plain text human readable/writable document format.
It comes with a “converter program” that can convert AsciiDoc documents to XHTML, DocBook or HTML. DocBook in turn can be converted to other formats such as PDF, TeX, Unix manpages and many more using the tool A2X which comes with AsciiDoc. Most of the Git documentation is written in AsciiDoc.
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 was released in 2002. AsciiDoc is written in Python so you need a Python interpreter (version 2.4 or later).
Key Features
- Readable markup.
- 3 types of documents:
- Article – used for short documents, articles and general documentation
- Book – normally used to produce DocBook output.
- Manpages – generate roff format UNIX manual pages. AsciiDoc manpage documents observe special header title and section naming conventions.
- HTML export and import tools.
- Tables.
- Link titles.
- Class attribute.
- ID attribute.
- Export: XHTML, LaTeX, PDF, DocBook, OpenDocument, EPUB, Man page.
Website: asciidoc.org
Support: User Guide
Developer: Stuart Rackham
License: GNU General Public License v2.0
Related Software
| Lightweight Markup Languages | |
|---|---|
| Markdown | Markup language and Text-to-HTML conversion tool |
| MultiMarkdown | Based on Markdown with additional features |
| GitHub Flavored Markdown | For user content on GitHub.com and GitHub Enterprise |
| Markdown Extra | Lightweight markup language based on Markdown |
| AsciiDoc | Presentable text document format for writing articles |
| Textile | Billed as a "humane web text generator" |
| Texy | Text-to-XHTML formatter and converter library |
| Tome | Markup Language and Tool Suite for Authors |
| reStructuredText | Markup Syntax and Parser Component of Docutils |
| Haml | Templating engine for HTML |
| JsonML | Map between XML and JSON |
| TOML | Tom’s Obvious Minimal Language |
| Djot | Light markup language inspired by CommonMark |
| Org-mode | Plain text markup for notes, documents, and workflows |
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