I would like to chime in to say that I also find it a bit sad that the 
default docbook (through fop) looks detached from the html output generated 
by asciidoc. External links don't even look the same. With URL in brackets 
after the text and no underline.

Also a saddening fact for people who would like to publish in multiple 
format is that customizing docbook is very hard in itself even after all 
the effort they did to allow it to be configurable/extensible. The learning 
curve is steep.

I've been through this before with PacketFence[1]. Custom frontpage (and 
building its xsl from xml), custom fonts, overriding standard docbook xsl 
and configuring several of docbook's standard parameters. A lot of time was 
spent on this only to have a decent looking but far from perfect PDF. If 
there could be a CSS for docbook (and a one-pass javascript to style the 
xml maybe?) it would be joy. The fact that there is no solution that I'm 
aware of to do code listing syntax highlighting in fop+docbook shows how 
hard that would be to do in XSLT.

At my new $work, I've convinced people to use asciidoc+git for its 
plaintext/use-your-editor/nicely-looking-html features but the last stretch 
to the PDF is done by a designer with proprietary software. It comes with 
all the copy and paste errors and forgot to re-apply style errors you can 
imagine. For long documents the proof-reading is really a burden.

The fact that asciidoc is "only the first-pass" means that everyone is 
duplicating effort on their end trying to make things look good and, I'm 
betting, often failing at it. What is O'Reilly doing? What are professional 
publishers doing? What is RedHat doing (their Java business is probably 
full of asciidoc)?

Even if the answer is they finish their last pass with a designer with 
proprietary software, my question would be: How do you get the basic markup 
through (bold, italics, fixed-width, code blocks, non-breaking characters, 
etc.) into that last step?

I LOVE asciidoc (do everything in it) but I would like to see a better PDF 
publishing story to it.

Cheers

[1]: https://github.com/inverse-inc/packetfence/tree/stable/docs

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