Try Asciidoc Instead of Markdown

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	Try Asciidoc Instead of Markdown (opensource.com)
	20 points by Inocez 1408 days ago

3 comments

d1sxeyes 1407 days ago

Why? Markdown works fine and is better known, I don't see anything that Asciidoc would do better than Markdown.

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thomascgalvin 1407 days ago

There are a number of elements supported by AsciiDoc that aren't available in Markdown[0].

For most writing, Markdown is perfectly sufficient. If you're doing complex stuff, however, AsciiDoc might make expressing your intent more straightforward.

[0]: https://docs.asciidoctor.org/asciidoc/latest/asciidoc-vs-mar...

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d1sxeyes 1407 days ago

Thanks, this article does not do a great job of highlighting Asciidoc’s USPs

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moistly 1407 days ago

> I don't see anything that Asciidoc would do better than Markdown.

If you don’t see anything, it must be because you have closed your eyes. Asciidoc does a ton of things that Markdown can not.

Complex tables. Admonitions. Generated ToCs. Definition lists. Block image with alt text. Inclusions. Block titles. In-line anchors. Conditional directives. Live code inclusion.

Just all the stuff that’s required to write complete, professional documentation instead of blog posts and readme notes.

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d1sxeyes 1407 days ago

I didn’t remember any of that from the article so I went back and checked. Seems that although you’re absolutely right, the article doesn’t give any details whatsoever other than obliquely hinting at it somewhere towards the bottom of the article.

Thanks for the comment, it actually seems quite a bit more interesting now.

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orthoxerox 1407 days ago

The biggest benefit of GitHub-flavored Markdown is that it works on GitHub with no additional processing needed.

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tomjakubowski 1407 days ago

Guess what? Asiidoc works out of the box there too.

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bovermyer 1407 days ago

At this point, I use Markdown for my Zola-powered static site, and straight LaTeX for actual books/PDFs.

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