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Comment by iheartmemcache | Hacker News Reader

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

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+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

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

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...

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.

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

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

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)

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

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