[timtylin]

I love AsciiBook. Everything but the name. If we ever get an amazing collaborative development tool like Github that has built-in AsciiBook rendering, this project would have been called "Scholarly AsciiBook (but we got Unicode support too I swear really)".

Edit: I was wrong about Github not supporting AsciiDoc

[boundlessdreamz]

Github does render asciidoc using asciidoctor. What is missing in that that is possible in Markdown?

[timtylin]

Well, I did not realize Github has had AsciiDoctor integration for two years now (I've been doing most of my scientific work in GitLab during that time). I retract that comment and regret the error. Hopefully they add it to Github pages some time soon.

To be honest, there was never really any conscious decision to pick Markdown over AsciiDoc. It was just serendipity that when I was looking to convert a bunch of my existing Markdown notes to papers, John happened to add (at Martin Fenner's urging) pretty robust support for citations to Pandoc. Being able to use an existing .bst files and Natbib author/year syntax with existing Bibtex database files, while also using CSL to format to everything else was pretty key. The syntax only worked in Markdown at the time, so I went with that. This project just simply grew into an experiment on how to get the least hack-y looking source document for what I needed.

Basically, I had a bunch of existing Markdown stuff typed with both my phone and my computer using NValt (already using the double-backtick math syntax as a hack), and I was looking for a way to reuse all that. If I had to do conversions or had to start from scratch, I would have just started another LaTeX Document, and then this project wouldn't be here.

As an aside aside: I personally think that one shortcoming of AsciiDoc is that Markdown ended up having a more mature application ecosystem outside of the most general purpose text-editing tools. I'm thinking of something like Scrivener/Ulysses which is really great for project writing and has robust markdown support while writing. I've also recently found out that TeXpad "mysteriously" formats Markdown syntax in the editor, and builds an in-editor TOC of it. This is in addition to with rendering support in basically every note-taking tool. Sadly AsciiDoc doesn't seem to have experienced a similar growth spurt in terms of popularity amongst developers, and as a result have a bit more friction to use.

[boundlessdreamz]

Yeah. Unfortunately asciidoc isn't as popular as markdown and the ecosystem is small. I never paid much attention to asciidoc until I read this blog post - https://medium.com/@chacon/living-the-future-of-technical-wr... and realized that I have experienced many of the same frustrations with markdown. I tried out asciidoc and became a convert :)

For live preview of asciidoc there are some options - http://asciidoctor.org/docs/editing-asciidoc-with-live-previ.... Among them Atom with live preview works really well.

[sytse]

Just wanted to mention that GitLab supports asciidoc https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq/pull/7569

[timtylin]

Thanks for the heads-up. I'm going to bug our admin again to upgrade.

[sytse]

Great! :)

[novaleaf]

fyi asciidoctor allows using markdown syntax inside your asciidoc file.

citation: http://asciidoctor.org/docs/asciidoc-syntax-quick-reference/...

[picks_at_nits]

In addition to supporting previews of AsciiDoc files, you’ll find that GitHub also does the “rendered prose diff” trick for commits and pull requests that include changes to AsciiDoc files.