The first paragraph of the Introduction to the AsciiDoc User Guide
says it all:
``AsciiDoc is a plain text human readable/writable document format
that can be translated to DocBook or HTML using the asciidoc(1)
command. You can then either use asciidoc(1) generated HTML directly
or run asciidoc(1) DocBook output through your favorite DocBook
toolchain or use the AsciiDoc a2x(1) toolchain wrapper to produce PDF,
EPUB, DVI, LaTeX, PostScript, man page, HTML and text formats.''
The project is not artificially limited by resources or contributors
it is limited by the purpose for which it was designed which is
informed by the UNIX maxim ``Make each program do one thing well. To
do a new job, build afresh rather than complicate old programs by
adding new features'' [McIlroy788].
DocBook (unlike HTML) is not an end in itself so you have to choose
and use a DocBook toolchain to generate presentation formats, but as
Lex has pointed out typography and downstream toolchains is a huge,
diverse and complex subject and is way outside the scope of AsciiDoc.
The best we can hope to do is introduce the toolchain concept and
point people towards external toolchain resources.
We've tried to make the basic use of the FOP and dblatex toolchains
easy by including the a2x toolchain wrapper which may contribute the
incorrect impression that the AsciiDoc project is an end-to-end
document generation system. a2x is an add-on and is not an integral
part of AsciiDoc.
I hope this helps clarify things.
Cheers, Stuart
On 26/03/12 20:43, Gour wrote:
On Mon, 26 Mar 2012 12:35:36 +1100
Lex Trotman<[email protected]> wrote:
The answer may not be satisfactory, but it is the answer. Asciidoc is
a small project and cannot expand its scope to include re-writing
documentation of existing toolchains.
I must say that I'm a bit surprised with the size of the project - it
seems that Stuart is practically the only one commiting the code
although I did believe that AsciiDoc is much bigger project. :-(
Especially as any such time would detract from development of
Asciidoc itself.
How many people contribute code to it?
For example I don't give a damn about non-English languages, but I
want better formatting of source code documentation (at the moment).
What is important depends on the user.
Sure, but from the tool using utf-8 by default one expects to have
decent support for non-English languages.
In any case, I'm thankful to you for this reply and I'm going to explore
quoting attributes/roles as well as re-consider reST/Sphinx considering
that, although I prefer AsciiDoc markup, the latter projects seems to
have much more people involved.
Sincerely,
Gour
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