AsciiDoc User Guide

Used for short documents, articles and general documentation. See the AsciiDoc distribution

./doc/article.txt example.

book

Books share the same format as articles; in addition there is the option to add level 0 book part sections.

Book documents will normally be used to produce DocBook output since DocBook processors can automatically generate footnotes, table of contents, list of tables, list of figures, list of examples and indexes.

AsciiDoc markup supports standard DocBook frontmatter and backmatter special sections (dedication, preface, bibliography, glossary, index, colophon) plus footnotes and index entries.

Example book documents

Book

The ./doc/book.txt file in the AsciiDoc distribution.

Multi-part book

The ./doc/book-multi.txt file in the AsciiDoc distribution.

manpage

Used to generate UNIX manual pages. AsciiDoc manpage documents observe special header title and section naming conventions — see the Manpage Documents section for details.

See also the asciidoc(1) man page source (./doc/asciidoc.1.txt) from the AsciiDoc distribution.

AsciiDoc Backends

The asciidoc(1) command translates an AsciiDoc formatted file to the backend format specified by the -b (—backend) command-line option. asciidoc(1) itself has little intrinsic knowledge of backend formats, all translation rules are contained in customizable cascading configuration files.

AsciiDoc ships with the following predefined backend output formats:

docbook

AsciiDoc generates the following DocBook document types: article, book and refentry (corresponding to the AsciiDoc article, book and manpage document types).

DocBook documents are not designed to be viewed directly. Most Linux distributions come with conversion tools (collectively called a toolchain) for converting DocBook files to presentation formats such as Postscript, HTML, PDF, DVI, roff (the native man page format), HTMLHelp, JavaHelp and text.

•The —backend=docbook command-line option produces DocBook XML.

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