Introducing AsciiDoctor, a text processor and publishing toolchain

I’m excited to announce a new resource for AsciiDoc, asciidoctor.org. In addition to serving as the project page for the Asciidoctor project and its integrations, this website helps promote AsciiDoc through education and advocacy.

Asciidoctor is a text processor and publishing toolchain for converting AsciiDoc markup into HTML 5, DocBook 4.5 and other formats. Written in Ruby, Asciidoctor was the first project to implement the AsciiDoc syntax, first introduced by the Python AsciiDoc processor, in another language. Asciidoctor is an open source library (MIT licensed) and published as a Ruby gem to rubygems.org. The git repositories for the project are hosted under the Asciidoctor organization on GitHub to encourage continued growth.

While Asciidoctor aims to offer full compliance with the AsciiDoc syntax (with some exceptions, noted in the project README), it’s more than just a clone.

The key highlight of asciidoctor.org is a collection of new AsciiDoc guides:

• What is AsciiDoc? Why do we need it?
• AsciiDoc Syntax Quick Reference
• AsciiDoc Writer’s Guide

The purpose of these guides is to answer your questions about AsciiDoc and get you familiar with the syntax quickly. They present AsciiDoc by following a recommended set of conventions to help you create more consistent documents and maximize your writing productivity.

If you see a change you want to make, contributing to the guides is easy!

The guides are written in AsciiDoc and hosted on GitHub. If you see a change you want to make in one of the guides, just look for the Edit button in the right-hand column and click on it. That will take you to an editor on GitHub where you can make the change and submit it as a pull request.

Alternatively, you can clone the project, make the change locally, commit it, then send a pull request in the usual way.

Once the change is merged into the develop branch, it gets published automatically.

I hope you find the guides useful, and I look forward to your feedback. Together, we can take the agony out of writing documentation!