Developer(s) Stuart Rackham Operating system | ||
Initial release November 25, 2002; 14 years ago (2002-11-25) Stable release 8.6.9 / November 9, 2013; 3 years ago (2013-11-09) | ||
AsciiDoc is a human-readable document format, semantically equivalent to DocBook XML, but using plain-text mark-up conventions. AsciiDoc documents can be created using any text editor and read “as-is”, or rendered to HTML or any other format supported by a DocBook tool-chain, i.e. PDF, TeX, Unix manpages, e-books, slide presentations, etc.
Contents
History
AsciiDoc was created in 2002 by Stuart Rackham who published tools (‘asciidoc’ and ‘a2x’), written in the Python programming language to convert plain-text, ‘human readable’ files to commonly used published document formats.
A Ruby implementation called ‘Asciidoctor’, released in 2013, is in use by GitHub and also provides a gateway to AsciiDoc use in the Java ecosystem.
Some of O'Reilly Media's books and e-books are authored using AsciiDoc mark-up.
Most of the Git documentation is written in AsciiDoc.
Example
The following shows text using AsciiDoc mark-up, and a rendering similar to that produced by an AsciiDoc processor: