Support for Asciidoc?

joachiedere

@ctietze, are you considering support for Asciidoc in upcoming versions of The Archive? I have heard from fellow PhD students that it is a syntax that is quite powerful but yet relatively simple to learn and write. Does anyone here have any experience of using it?

mediapathic

I experimented with it briefly, and considered the lack of generalized support not worth the overhead of learning another markup language. Put another way: Markdown does everything I need, and more software understands it. However, that said, most of Asciidoc's strengths are with a sort of technical writing which I don't often do, so if that lies within your needs it may be worth looking into.

ctietze

We don't plan to support any other highlighting syntax, because Markdown is great for general-purpose note-taking already.

It does have some cool features for writing, like optional block titles (for code blocks, blockquotes, tables, ...). But I'd argue there's no need to take notes in Asciidoc directly. To me, this is akin to asking for LaTeX support in notes because you end up typesetting your paper in LaTeX anyway. My response would be similar: use a great converter and manage the writing project draft separately.

The converter pipeline using pandoc is super simple:

pandoc --standalone --columns=80 --atx-headers --to=asciidoc --output=out.adoc input.md 

Without giving away too much of the vague plans for the future, I'd like to think that Asciidoc would be a great syntax to compose text drafts in, while Markdown is still the better language to maintain your long-lived note archive with because it's so widely supported as an input language for converters. (pandoc, mmd2pdf, LeanPub's publishing tools, GitHub books, ...)

joachiedere

Thanks a lot for that info. It sounds very reasonable.