[byb]

I want to second your comment. AsciiDoc is growing in popularity. A year ago I surveyed a dozen tools and went all in with it.

I'd like to see IJ take it a step further beyond AsciiDoc, by supporting Antora to generate and deploy static websites. When combined with Antora-Assembler its also possible to generate PDFs using the ruby-based AsciiDoctor PDF.

I'm currently introducing a Docs-as-Code workflow using Visual Studio Code at my organization, because of the very permissive license terms of VSC and the decent AsciiDoc preview function. Mostly though, I find reading adoc files quite easy until lots of Antora snippets (which don't resolve) and conditions start getting added in. A lot of technical writers I've met have had a hard time understanding XML, which is nothing to say of the average office worker who wants to open up their old copy of Office 97 and write a completely unstructed document with a WYSIWIG interface.

IJ IDE licenses start to add up, so if IJ is competitive against Oxygen, this might make sense for a lot of organizations to jump over.

[jddj]

Does the asciidoc to pdf workflow involve an intermediate html / headless chromium step?

[byb]

In most cases no, AsciiDoctor-PDF converter uses the Ruby library PDF library Prawn to generate PDFs, However, there are alternative PDF converters which do convert from HTML (the VSC AsciiDoctor plug-in allows the option to use a different converter), but I don't think they use chrome. Please note that using different pdf converters is a bit of an advanced topic. https://wkhtmltopdf.org/, and asciidoctor-web-pdf. https://github.com/ggrossetie/asciidoctor-web-pdf

I encourage everyone to take a look at the documentation; this is the markup language I now use for all my personal and professional projects. https://docs.asciidoctor.org/

[tacker2000]

I used the asciidoctor/asciidoctor-pdf program extensively a while ago, and whilst it wasn’t that bad, it was still a bit hacky, didnt support page breaks for example. But maybe it got better now…

[bobbylarrybobby]

The docs call out that page break is supposed to work in PDF, so I guess it should work now? I've found Asciidoctor-pdf to be pretty incredible in the output it produces — only problem is the arcane config file…