> Zam wrote: > *All things considered*, maybe the best way of finding out if there is, in fact, "something to the added complexity of the DocBook *tool chain* that might have got lost in Asciidoctor's simplicity" is asking the community.
This is a very fair question. Lex has answered it, but I want to offer an additional comment that could help put it into perspective. AsciiDoc.py actually provides two very different tools. The first tool is the (legacy) AsciiDoc processor named asciidoc.py that generates various output formats, such as HTML and DocBook. The second tool is a DocBook toolchain frontend named a2x.py. Asciidoctor has replaced the first tool, but not the second one. I never thought it was a good idea to couple a DocBook toolchain frontend into the same project that is also doing the rather ambitious tasks of parsing and converting AsciiDoc (which is why I didn't do it). But many people got used to having a2x. Both AsciiDoc.py and Asciidoctor can generate DocBook (AsciiDoc.py only generates DocBook 4.5, whereas Asciidoctor can also generate DocBook 5). >From there, you have actually left the AsciiDoc world and have entered the DocBook world, where dblatex and Apache FOP come into play. So you don't lose anything by using Asciidoctor. You only gain the ability to also use a third PDF generator named Asciidoctor PDF (and a fourth if you count the emerging Asciidoctor Web PDF). dblatex is a very complex program to install properly and not all package managers install it in a way that a2x can use it out of the box (Fedora comes to mind). I always have to install additional latex packages (quotes.syl to name one). It seems reasonable to me to expect a2x to function, sure, but you really don't need it. You could generate DocBook (using AsciiDoc.py or Asciidoctor), then feed that into a DocBook toolchain of your choosing. That still requires effort to get set up, but at least you can understand that the complexity is with the DocBook toolchain, not with AsciiDoc.py or Asciidoctor. Best Regards, -Dan -- Dan Allen (he, him, his) | @mojavelinux | https://twitter.com/mojavelinux -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "asciidoc" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/asciidoc/CAKeHnO6N6GakZzMN7RMXsF0BO_CX1ob6D%2B_3N99bNApNpAZpyQ%40mail.gmail.com.
