Asciidoc support: why? and what?

[jmfayard]

Hello, there was a ticket for supporting asciidoctor but it was too old so I'm reopening the discussion here.

Why is Markdown only half good?

Markdown is currently the de facto standard markup for writing, it's everywhere.

The reason for it is that it got all the right ideas on how to make the simple things simple.

At the same time, Markdown is not a standard markup at all. Everyone starts with the basics of Markdown but almost no one seems fully satisfied with it. So we have "Markdown PLUS" everywhere. Markdown plus a thid-party tool to generate the table of contents. Here on GitHub, we have Markdown PLUS nice extensions. On dev.to, we have Markdown PLUS useful liquid tags. Static Website generator have Markdown PLUS YAML front matter. Etc... etc...

Once you have gone too much in the "Markdown PLUS" rabbit hole, you realize you need something as simple as Markdown with the easy things, but that who feature extensibility in its core.

And that's Asciidoc

https://asciidoctor.org/docs/user-manual/#what-is-asciidoctor

https://asciidoctor.org/docs/user-manual/#compared-to-markdown

Now, clearly Markdown is currently an order of magnitude more used than any other markups. If supporting another format meant twice the amount of efforts, no tooling author would do it and they would be right. Which leads me to my next question?

What's the minimum effort from you that would be great for us?

Currently I am writing asciidoctor with:

• IntelliJ + extension https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/7391-asciidoc

• Asciidoctor live Preview in the browser https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/asciidoctorjs-live-previe/iaalpfgpbocpdfblpnhhgllgbdbchmia

It's very good, but of course IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate is not the lightest editor you could possibly build :P

From this experience, the most valuable things Stackedit could do for Asciidoctor early adopters that would require the minimum of efforts are:

• Just being a good text editor that connects with Google Drive, GitHub, Gist, ... This is already done.
• Add a "Convert Markdown to Asciidoctor" feature like IntelliJ does. It's a great way to transition from what everybody knows to the new format. This could probably be handled by another tool like pandoc.
• Make the basic shortcuts and toolbar icons work when editing an asciidoc file. Things like bold, italic, links, images, ...
• Do NOT invest lots of time in the Preview Pane! We will be fine with the asciidoctor.js live preview in Chrome!