Then again, content is king. Write it on napkins if you must. When complete, you can spend two days to transcribe to whatever format the publisher requires.

However, the open source tooling doesn't support what I need for a physical book, so I chose to use pandoc and markdown instead mostly for to the market size of markdown.

(I previously wrote my own tool chain for rst to latex and epub, so I'm week seats of what features are needed to make digital and physical books. I was sick of using a format that had limited tooling while the world had moved on to markdown.)

I mean I did not try AsciiDoc until now because there are so many choices of input formats and the ones I've tried so far have been disappointing one way or the other.

I talked about Org-mode rendering broken in edge cases. Same with Latex too. I see Pandoc has first-class support for its own Pandoc Markdown format. But the support for all other input formats seem patchy.

If you think Pandoc has good support for AsciiDoc without any edge case issues, I'll be most certainly trying it out.