I’ve been a markdown user almost exclusively - more due to github and stackoverflow popularizing the format. Markdown is great for lightweight markup and with excellent tools like Pandoc, it’s a joy to produce good looking technical docs. Suffice to say that I’ve been taken with markdown and even use it to produce word documents and such.
While Markdown is great, it has it’s share of niggles - try to go beyond the basics and want some advanced features and you get into trouble. Want tables? Or want to include diagrams generated from ascii art? It’s all a hit or miss depending on which Markdown implementation you’re using. Ditto for things like nested lists and lists with sub paras and whole lot of other niggles where each different Markdown implementation may end up behaving differently. There have been some efforts to have a rigourous spec but I don’t think things went anywhere with CommonMark - atleast, I don’t see it used much anywhere.
For the latter problem of wanting to include diagrams, I wrote
mermaid-filter and while it’s
super useful, it works only with
mermaid. If you want to use graphviz
or something like that, sorry - you’re out of luck.
I’ve resigned myself to Pandoc’s version of markdown - since I end up using pandoc almost always to convert to other formats.
Wanting a better lightweight markup format, I spent sometime looking at
alternatives this weekend and came upon asciidoc - and I’m just wowed!
It pretty much ticks all the boxes in terms of all the niggles I have
with Markdown and it’s not so different from markdown either so that
transitioning to AsciiDoc is a non issue.
AsciiDoc has the following over Markdown:
-
Supports advanced formatting natively.
-
Native code formatting with pluggable syntax highlighters.
-
code call outs - oh so useful.
-
-
Rigourous spec
-
Smart, natively extensible
-
For ex: want diagrams? A whole bunch are supported
-
It’s miles ahead of Markdown, IMO - so much so that I’m jumping ship :)
So, in a rush of enthusiasm, I’ve updated
EasyBlogger with asciidoc
support and pushed a release out to PyPI. This also means that I would
probably not need
mermaid-filter anymore - but
hey, you should see better looking posts from me here.
