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Looking for AsciiDoc editor

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Shades:
For documentation purposes, I have suddenly a need for an AsciiDoc editor. AsciiDoc is a text based format and in essence even the the standard notepad in Windows is able to create AsciiDoc documents. In many ways it is similar to Markdown, yet it also isn't. The receiver of this documentation is dead set on AsciiDoc and will not hear of anything else.

For Markdown there are quite a few editors that make the creation of Markdown documents a lot easier. For AsciiDoc, not so much.

Google hasn't helped me much when looking for AsciiDoc editors. All my searches revealed two editors:  AsciiDoctor   and   AsciiDocFX   
AsciiDocFX looks reasonable and has some features that are good, but there are also many quirks. Furthermore, it is also Java based (which is not a favorite of mine) and has leaks RAM if you leave the application open too long. You could compare it to editing documents "under water" in Word Perfect, except with a vertical split, instead of a horizontal one. So it is workable for someone who is acquainted with that style of working. Or someone like me who is (too?) familiar with wiki markup and editing.

There is also Visual Studio Code that has an AsciiDoc extension, but it isn't nice to use, because the preview and the text are not "linked". As in: click on the preview and the edit section doesn't "follow" to the location where you clicked in the preview and vice versa. Yet it is nicer to use than chopping up the Eclipse IDE (Java again) to turn it into an AsciiDoc editor.

However, for those generations that grew up with Office and Word, any of the above options that will be a hard "sell". In essence, I am looking for an editor that looks like Word or Wordpad, with similar  features as AsciiDocFX.

GitHub shows a lot of converters and plugins related to AsciiDoc, but not editors (at least not in the first 10 pages of their website's search results). SourceForge, Codeplex, PasteBin and others from this repository list are also a bust.

Does anyone here have any more ideas where I could find such software?

jeromg:
Hi Shades, maybe you've already thought about it, I'm not familiar with AsciiDoc but I would recommend editing in markdown (but I may be biased since I do everything in markdown these days) and converting to AsciiDoc using pandoc, see here for examples.

Cheers  /jerome

wraith808:
It's at times like this that we had a simple way to vote up.  Been a bit busy today, but planned to answer exactly the above.  :Thmbsup:

jeromg:
hehe  :Thmbsup:

Shades:
Hi Shades, maybe you've already thought about it, I'm not familiar with AsciiDoc but I would recommend editing in markdown (but I may be biased since I do everything in markdown these days) and converting to AsciiDoc using pandoc, see here for examples.

Cheers  /jerome
-jeromg (June 09, 2019, 01:48 AM)
--- End quote ---

Don't worry, not many people are. Which is also why AsciiDoc software is in the state it is. And if you would ask me, Markdown would have been fitting the documentation bill just fine. Heck, even a wiki would have been sufficient. But not my call. Actually, there is one person at the company receiving the documentation, who made a ruckus about AsciiDoc and now we are all stuck with it.

Before this, I had never heard of AsciiDoc. Gaining this knowledge did not improve my career or life in any way. And continuing with this honesty, it feels like a person or group of persons thought about making a standard better than the 10 earlier attempts of making the standard for documentation. Result? AsciiDoc is now the 11th standard.

While I am put in charge of converting existing documentation to AsciiDoc, those that need/want to make new documentation are not willing to give up their Word GUI habits/mindset to go back 20 years GUI concept-wise. For myself and my work-flow, the current AsciiDoc editors are adequate. As a proponent of wanting to separate content from layout, I don't use Office much anymore. Instead, I use PanDoc to generate the same document in whatever format the receiver wants.

Knowing full well that I am weird this way (and probably many other ways too) I can't expect everyone to work like this. Actually, it is my opinion that most people would not be able to create documentation without an Office suite anymore. Or even want to, for that matter.

To get a better/quicker adoption of AsciiDoc, it would be a big benefit to have software that enables people with "Office"-mindset to work as they are more or less used to. Hence my request for a new place where to look for AsciiDoc editors that look like Word/WordPad. Asking those same people to work with PanDoc, a command-line tool, to convert MarkDown to AsciiDoc, I think that would be too much. For myself though, your idea has merit.

It would seem better just to wait patiently until AsciiDoc software improves before pushing it onto others. In the mean time I'll make scripts to handle the conversion of existing documentation "automagically", reducing that headache for myself.



 

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