[iheartmemcache]

Also, there's asciidoc[1] which is implements the Open Docbook[3] schema. Along with it is the Ruby ecosystem for asciidoctor[2] which is:

  * A mature[1], plain-text writing format for authoring notes, articles, documentation, books, ebooks, web pages, slide decks, blog posts, man pages and more.

  * A text processor and toolchain for translating AsciiDoc documents into various formats (called backends), including HTML, DocBook, PDF and ePub.

Along with a healthy ecosystem of scripts to convert between basically all the formats, from troff/tex for the academics, org-mode for the emacs nerds, to Markdown for the bloggers. All basically interoperate with

I have a fairly extensive list of typesetting frameworks and document publishing management systems (along the lines of Adobe FrameMaker), but I'm running out the door

[1] http://asciidoc.org [2] http://asciidoctor.org/docs/what-is-asciidoc/ [3] http://docbook.org/whatis

[jszymborski]

+1 for asciidoc... currently writing my master's thesis in asciidoc and it has all the nice things you need in for a highly-structured document, but in a plain-text format.

Asciidoc has a lot of nice things like footnotes, bibliographies, including remote asciidoc files and highly-customisable table of contents features that Markdown simply doesn't have.

Check-out the Pro Git book on GitHub written in AsciiDoc, it's a great example [0].

Also, slightly off-topic, but writing long-form documents in plain-text is awesome. Ditch MS Word/LO Writer for your favourite text editor, use Git branches to try out different ideas or drafts... it's bliss.

[0] https://github.com/progit/progit2

[timClicks]

Q: what do you do for helpers like spell check?

[jszymborski]

I mostly bounce between VS Code and Atom, both have spell check packages (e.g [0]).

For the "Review" functions, Git can be used in an imho more powerful way.

Other than that, I'm not sure what other helpers you might be missing :)

[0] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ban.spel...

[kimi]

If you use Asciidoc you may want to look at Dockbooker -https://github.com/l3nz/dockbooker - it is a single Docker image that contains all the toolchain including image processing (you need images with different sizes/densities for e.g. PDF vs chunked HTML) and preprocesses Graphviz images.

[youngtaff]

I wrote a book using asciidoc and really didn't like it

[jacobush]

Interesting. Why did you choose it and why didn't you like it?

[youngtaff]

Publisher's platform relied on asciidoc so I didn't really have much of a choice :-)

The simple things were easy enough to get to grips with but some of the more 'complex' stuff was a pain, and the markup got in the way of the writing for me.

(I'm slightly dyslexic so I don't know if the markup was actually making the text harder for me to read)

[type0]

Where it really shines is for writing documentation, too bad there is no tool like Sphinx that could enable the search functionality.