Lex: Please note that these are friendly complaints. I am also a software developer. I spent the time writing this up and mailing the link to the asciidoc list in order to share my experiences. I am clearly a demanding user, since I want advanced features like math equations, code insertion and bibliographies to all work. Asciidoc is clearly a useful tool 'out of the box' for less demanding users...
--Bill > You complain about lack of control of various presentation/layout issues, but Asciidoc is explicitly only a content markup language. This is because all but HTML outputs go via docbook, which has no presentation features. As you said, if you want control, use Latex or some other markup which has presentation/layout capabilities. I'm not sure how to address this misunderstanding, it comes up many times. Even after you say that AsciiDoc is only a content markup language, I'm not sure what this means precisely. From my user perspective, the default layout of the latexmath environment for equation blocks differs from my expectations in HTML. This is the result from running the 'asciidoc' command, so you need to own up to part of the responsibility of the formatting, even if AsciiDoc is 'only' a content markup language. Now, is this an AsciiDoc bug? No. Is this a problem for users? Potentially. I thought that it was enough of a problem that I wrote a custom latexmath environment and reworked the format. > You note that epub only just supports mathml, then complain that Asciidoc doesn't support converting to it already. But you never asked for assistance in setting that up. In fact HTML support is via a javascript latex to mathml converter and for epub you could use an external converter using the techniques I discussed with you for SVG or image. For HTML and PDF files, I don't care about MathML. It's only appears useful for epub. I did consider generating SVG files for epub, but a variety of blogs noted that that can often lead to ugly documents. I think it's fair to say that "There is only limited support for generating eBook documents that contain mathematical equations." AsciiDoc doesn't support the SVG generation out of the box, and I had run out of time and energy to try and make it happen. > You complain about formatting of math in HTML, but never asked about it. Do you know that you can do it? The Mathml standard explicitly leaves a lot of the styling up to the renderer, ie the browser. Can you write anl html+mathml document that centers/indents the mathml, portably, in most browsers? My (admittedly limited) attempts didn't work. What I had to work around is that the $, \[ and \] symbols get passed into the HTML translation engine. Thus, you cannot insert the formatting into the latexmath block itself. My rework is to simply hard-code the latextmath block to provide that \[ and \], and around that I added the HTML formatting logic. >Multiple authors is a known issue, but no one has come up with a nice suggestion of how to do it. I'm sure Stuart is open to suggestions. Um.... asciidoc could simply recognize multiple :author: declarations. Seriously, this does not look like a complex issue to resolve... > Problems with citations are caused by known dblatex bugs. Yeah, I saw that. Bummer. This issue should be highlighted in the asciidoc documentation and examples. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "asciidoc" group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/asciidoc/-/UKtyP0eMaDIJ. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/asciidoc?hl=en.
