Table of Contents
AsciiDoc is a text document format for writing documentation,
articles, manuals, books and UNIX man pages. AsciiDoc files can be
translated to HTML and DocBook markups using the asciidoc(1)
command.
AsciiDoc is highly configurable: both the AsciiDoc source file syntax
and the backend output markups (which can be almost any type of
SGML/XML markup) can be customized and extended by the user.
Plain text is the most universal electronic document format, no matter what computing environment you use, you can always read and write plain text documentation. But for many applications plain text is not a viable presentation format. HTML, PDF and roff (roff is used for man pages) are the most widely used UNIX presentation formats. DocBook is a popular UNIX documentation markup format which can be translated to HTML, PDF and other presentation formats.
AsciiDoc is a plain text human readable/writable document format that
can be translated to DocBook or HTML using the asciidoc(1)
command.
You can then either use asciidoc(1)
generated HTML directly or run
asciidoc(1)
DocBook output through your favorite DocBook toolchain or
use the AsciiDoc a2x(1)
toolchain wrapper to produce PDF, DVI, LaTeX,
PostScript, man page, HTML and text formats.
The AsciiDoc format is a useful presentation format in its own right: AsciiDoc files are unencumbered by markup and are easily viewed, proofed and edited.
AsciiDoc is light weight: it consists of a single Python script and a
bunch of configuration files. Apart from asciidoc(1)
and a Python
interpreter, no other programs are required to convert AsciiDoc text
files to DocBook or HTML. See Example AsciiDoc Documents
below.
You write an AsciiDoc document the same way you would write a normal text document, there are no markup tags or arcane notations. Built-in AsciiDoc formatting rules have been kept to a minimum and are reasonably obvious.
Text markup conventions tend to be a matter of (often strong) personal
preference: if the default syntax is not to your liking you can define
your own by editing the text based asciidoc(1)
configuration files.
You can create your own configuration files to translate AsciiDoc
documents to almost any SGML/XML markup.
asciidoc(1)
comes with a set of configuration files to translate
AsciiDoc articles, books or man pages to HTML or DocBook backend
formats.
See the README
and INSTALL
files for install prerequisites and
procedures. Packagers take a look at Appendix B: Packager Notes.
The best way to quickly get a feel for AsciiDoc is to view the AsciiDoc web site and/or distributed examples:
.txt
source files in the distribution ./doc
directory
in conjunction with the corresponding HTML and DocBook XML files.
There are three types of AsciiDoc documents: article, book and manpage. All document types share the same AsciiDoc format with some minor variations.
Use the asciidoc(1)
-d
(--doctype
) option to specify the AsciiDoc
document type — the default document type is article.
By convention the .txt
file extension is used for AsciiDoc document
source files.
Used for short documents, articles and general documentation. See the
AsciiDoc distribution ./doc/article.txt
example.
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
./doc/book.txt
file in the AsciiDoc distribution.
./doc/book-multi.txt
file in the AsciiDoc distribution.
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.
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:
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, PostScript, LaTeX, roff (the native man page format), HTMLHelp, JavaHelp and text.
--backend=docbook
command-line option produces DocBook XML.
You can produce the older DocBook SGML format using the
--attribute sgml
command-line option.
encoding
attribute to set the character
set encoding.
imagesdir
attribute to prepend to the target file
name paths in image inline and block macros. Defaults to a blank
string.
./doc/book.txt
example book).
The default asciidoc(1)
backend is xhtml11
which generates XHTML 1.1
markup styled with CSS2. Default output file have a .html
extension.
xhtml11 document generation is influenced by the following
optional attributes (the default behavior is to generate XHTML with no
section numbers, embedded CSS and no linked admonition icon images):
Adds a table of contents to the start of the document.
toc.js
JavaScript in the output document — use the linkcss attribute
to link the script.
The following example generates a numbered table of contents by
embedding the toc.js
script in the mydoc.html
output document
(to link the script to the output document use the linkcss and
scriptsdir attributes):
$ asciidoc -a toc -a numbered mydoc.txt
toc
attribute must be specified using the --attribute
command-line option. If you define the toc
attribute in a custom
configuration file it won’t be recognized because the
conditionally included header code will have already been
processed.
Sets the number of title levels (1..4) reported in the table of contents (see the toc attribute above). Defaults to 2 and must be used with the toc attribute. Example usage:
$ asciidoc -a toc -a toclevels=3 doc/asciidoc.txt
.
(the same directory as the linking document).
.
(the same directory as the linking document).
./images/icons
.
![]() | |
The path names of images, icons and scripts are relative to the output document not the source document. |
Set the input and output document character set encoding. For
example the --attribute encoding=ISO-8859-1
command-line option
will set the character set encoding to ISO-8859-1
.
The encoding attribute can be set using an AttributeEntry inside the document header but it must come at the start of the document before the document title. For example:
:encoding: ISO-8859-1
xhtml11-quirks.css
stylesheet to work around IE6 browser
incompatibilities (this is the default behavior).
AsciiDoc XHTML output is styled using CSS2 stylesheets from the
distribution ./stylesheets/
directory.
![]() | |
All browsers have CSS quirks, but Microsoft’s IE6 has so many
omissions and errors that the |
Default xhtml11 stylesheets:
./stylesheets/xhtml11.css
./stylesheets/xhtml11-manpage.css
./stylesheets/xhtml11-quirks.css
Use the theme attribute to select an alternative set of stylesheets.
For example, the command-line option -a theme=foo
will use
stylesheets foo.css
, foo-manpage.css
and foo-quirks.css
instead
of the default stylesheets.
Use the stylesheet attribute to include an additional stylesheet in
XHTML documents. For example, the command-line option -a
stylesheet=newsletter.css
will use stylesheets newsletter.css
.
An AsciiDoc document consists of a series of block elements starting with an optional document Header, followed by an optional Preamble, followed by zero or more document Sections.
Almost any combination of zero or more elements constitutes a valid AsciiDoc document: documents can range from a single sentence to a multi-part book.
Block elements consist of one or more lines of text and may contain other block elements.
The AsciiDoc block structure can be informally summarized [1] as follows:
Document ::= (Header?,Preamble?,Section*) Header ::= (Title,(AuthorLine,RevisionLine?)?) AuthorLine ::= (FirstName,(MiddleName?,LastName)?,EmailAddress?) RevisionLine ::= (Revision?,Date) Preamble ::= (SectionBody) Section ::= (Title,SectionBody?,(Section)*) SectionBody ::= ((BlockTitle?,Block)|BlockMacro)+ Block ::= (Paragraph|DelimitedBlock|List|Table) List ::= (BulletedList|NumberedList|LabeledList|CalloutList) BulletedList ::= (ListItem)+ NumberedList ::= (ListItem)+ CalloutList ::= (ListItem)+ LabeledList ::= (ListEntry)+ ListEntry ::= (ListLabel,ListItem) ListLabel ::= (ListTerm+) ListItem ::= (ItemText,(List|ListParagraph|ListContinuation)*)
Where:
BlockId
, AttributeEntry
and AttributeList
block elements (not
shown) can occur almost anywhere.
The Header is optional but must start on the first line of the document and must begin with a document title. Optional Author and Revision lines immediately follow the title. The header can be preceded by a CommentBlock or comment lines.
The author line contains the author’s name optionally followed by the author’s email address. The author’s name consists of a first name followed by optional middle and last names separated by white space. Multi-word first, middle and last names can be entered in the header author line using the underscore as a word separator. The email address comes last and must be enclosed in angle <> brackets. Author names cannot contain angle <> bracket characters.
The optional document header revision line should immediately follow the author line. The revision line can be one of two formats:
An alphanumeric document revision number followed by a date:
The document heading is separated from the remainder of the document by one or more blank lines.
Here’s an example AsciiDoc document header:
Writing Documentation using AsciiDoc ==================================== Stuart Rackham <srackham@gmail.com> v2.0, February 2003
You can override or set header parameters by passing revision,
data, email, author, authorinitials, firstname and
lastname attributes using the asciidoc(1)
-a
(--attribute
)
command-line option. For example:
$ asciidoc -a date=2004/07/27 article.txt
The revision attribute can be an RCS/CSV/SVN $Id$ marker. Attributes can also be added to the header for substitution in the header template with Attribute Entry elements.
The Preamble is an optional untitled section body between the document Header and the first Section title.
AsciiDoc supports five section levels 0 to 4 (although only book documents are allowed to contain level 0 sections). Section levels are delineated by the section titles.
Sections are translated using configuration file markup templates. To
determine which configuration file template to use AsciiDoc first
searches for special section titles in the [specialsections]
configuration entries, if not found it uses the [sect<level>]
template.
The -n
(--section-numbers
) command-line option auto-numbers HTML
outputs (DocBook line numbering is handled automatically by the
DocBook toolchain commands).
Section IDs are auto-generated from section titles if the sectids
attribute is defined (the default behavior). The primary purpose of
this feature is to ensure persistence of table of contents links:
missing section IDs are generated dynamically by the JavaScript TOC
generator after the page is loaded. This means, for example, that if
you go to a bookmarked dynamically generated TOC address the page will
load but the browser will ignore the (as yet ungenerated) section ID.
The IDs are generated by the following algorithm:
idprefix
attribute (so there’s no possibility of name
clashes with existing document IDs). Prepend an underscore if the
idprefix
attribute is not defined.
_2
, _3
…) is added if a same named
auto-generated section ID exists.
For example the title Jim’s House would generate the ID
_jim_s_house
.
In addition to normal sections, documents can contain optional frontmatter and backmatter sections — for example: preface, bibliography, table of contents, index.
The AsciiDoc configuration file [specialsections]
section specifies
special section titles and the corresponding backend markup templates.
[specialsections]
entries are formatted like:
<pattern>=<name>
<pattern>
is a Python regular expression and <name>
is the name of
a configuration file markup template section. If the <pattern>
matches an AsciiDoc document section title then the backend output is
marked up using the <name>
markup template (instead of the default
sect<level>
section template). The {title}
attribute value is set
to the value of the matched regular expression group named title, if
there is no title group {title}
defaults to the whole of the AsciiDoc
section title. If <name>
is blank then any existing entry with the same
<pattern>
will be deleted.
AsciiDoc comes preconfigured with the following special section titles:
Preface (book documents only) Abstract (article documents only) Dedication (book documents only) Glossary Bibliography|References Colophon (book documents only) Index Appendix [A-Z][:.] <title>
Inline document elements are used to markup character
formatting and various types of text substitution. Inline elements and
inline element syntax is defined in the asciidoc(1)
configuration
files.
Here is a list of AsciiDoc inline elements in the (default) order in which they are processed:
[specialcharacters]
configuration file sections.
[quotes]
configuration file
sections.
[specialwords]
configuration file sections.
[replacements]
configuration file sections.
The AsciiDoc source document is read and processed as follows:
[header]
template section
which is then written to the output file.
[footer]
template section is substituted
and written to the output file.
When a block element is encountered asciidoc(1)
determines the type of
block by checking in the following order (first to last): (section)
Titles, BlockMacros, Lists, DelimitedBlocks, Tables, AttributeEntrys,
AttributeLists, BlockTitles, Paragraphs.
The default paragraph definition [paradef-default]
is last element
to be checked.
Knowing the parsing order will help you devise unambiguous macro, list and block syntax rules.
Inline substitutions within block elements are performed in the following default order:
The substitutions and substitution order performed on Title, Paragraph and DelimitedBlock elements is determined by configuration file parameters.
Words and phrases can be formatted by enclosing inline text with quote characters:
Monospaced text
Quoted text can be prefixed with an attribute list. Currently the only use made of this feature is to allow the font color, background color and size to be specified (XHTML/HTML only, not DocBook) using the first three positional attribute arguments. The first argument is the text color; the second the background color; the third is the font size. Colors are valid CSS colors and the font size is a number which treated as em units. Here are some examples:
[red]#Red text#. [,yellow]*bold text on a yellow background*. [blue,#b0e0e6]+Monospaced blue text on a light blue background+ [,,2]#Double sized text#.
New quotes can be defined by editing asciidoc(1)
configuration files.
See the Configuration Files section for details.
Quoted text behavior
[quotes]
entry can be subsequently undefined
by setting it to a blank value.
There are actually two types of quotes:
Quote text that must be bounded by white space, for example a phrase or a word. These are the most common type of quote and are the ones discussed previously.
Unconstrained quotes have no boundary constraints and can be placed
anywhere within inline text. For consistency and to make them easier
to remember unconstrained quotes are double-ups of the _
, *
, +
and #
constrained quotes:
__unconstrained emphasized text__ **unconstrained strong text** ++unconstrained monospaced text++ ##unconstrained unquoted text##
The following example emboldens the letter F:
**F**ile Open...
![]() | |
The \*\*F**ile Open... |
Put ^carets on either^ side of the text to be superscripted, put ~tildes on either side~ of text to be subscripted. For example, the following line:
e^πi^+1 = 0. H~2~O and x^10^. Some ^super text^ and ~some sub text~
Is rendered like:
eπi+1 = 0. H2O and x10. Some super text and some sub text
Superscripts and subscripts are implemented as unconstrained quotes so they can be escaped with a leading backslash and prefixed with with an attribute list.
A plus character preceded by at least one space character at the end
of a non-blank line forces a line break. It generates a line break
(br
) tag for HTML outputs and a custom XML asciidoc-br
processing
instruction for DocBook outputs. The asciidoc-br
processing
instruction is handled by a2x(1)
if you use FOP.
A line of three or more less-than (<<<
) characters will generate a
hard page break in DocBook and printed HTML outputs. It uses the CSS
page-break-after
property for HTML outputs and a custom XML
asciidoc-pagebreak
processing instruction for DocBook outputs. The
asciidoc-pagebreak
processing instruction is handled by
a2x(1)
if you use FOP. Hard page breaks are sometimes handy
but as a general rule you should let your page processor generate page
breaks for you.
A line of three or more apostrophe characters will generate a ruler
line. It generates a ruler (hr
) tag for HTML outputs and a custom XML
asciidoc-hr
processing instruction for DocBook outputs. The
asciidoc-hr
processing instruction is handled by a2x(1)
if
you use FOP.
By default tab characters input files will translated to 8 spaces. Tab
expansion is set with the tabsize entry in the configuration file
[miscellaneous]
section and can be overridden in included files by
setting a tabsize attribute in the include
macro’s attribute list.
For example:
include::addendum.txt[tabsize=2]
The tab size can also be set using the attribute command-line option,
for example --attribute tabsize=4
The following replacements are defined in the default AsciiDoc configuration:
(C) copyright, (TM) trademark, (R) registered trademark, -- em dash, ... ellipsis, -> right arrow, <- left arrow, => right double arrow, <= left double arrow.
Which are rendered as:
© copyright, ™ trademark, ® registered trademark, — em dash, … ellipsis, → right arrow, ← left arrow, ⇒ right double arrow, ⇐ left double arrow.
You can also include arbitrary entity references in the AsciiDoc source. Examples:
➊ ¶
renders:
➊ ¶
To render a replacement literally escape it with a leading back-slash.
The Configuration Files section explains how to configure your own replacements.
Words defined in [specialwords]
configuration file sections are
automatically marked up without having to be explicitly notated.
The Configuration Files section explains how to add and replace special words.
Document and section titles can be in either of two formats:
A two line title consists of a title line, starting hard against the left margin, and an underline. Section underlines consist a repeated character pairs spanning the width of the preceding title (give or take up to three characters):
The default title underlines for each of the document levels are:
Level 0 (top level): ====================== Level 1: ---------------------- Level 2: ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Level 3: ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Level 4 (bottom level): ++++++++++++++++++++++
Examples:
Level One Section Title -----------------------
Level 2 Subsection Title ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
One line titles consist of a single line delimited on either side by one or more equals characters (the number of equals characters corresponds to the section level minus one). Here are some examples:
= Document Title (level 0) = == Section title (level 1) == === Section title (level 2) === ==== Section title (level 3) ==== ===== Section title (level 4) =====
Note
[titles]
section sect0
…sect4
entries.
Setting the first title attribute to float
generates a free-floating
title. A free-floating title is rendered just like a normal section
title but is not formally associated with a text body and is not part
of the regular section hierarchy so the normal ordering rules do not
apply. Floating titles can also be used in contexts where section
titles are illegal: for example sidebar and admonition blocks.
Example:
[float] The second day ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A BlockTitle element is a single line beginning with a period followed by the title text. A BlockTitle is applied to the immediately following Paragraph, DelimitedBlock, List, Table or BlockMacro. For example:
.Notes - Note 1. - Note 2.
is rendered as:
Notes
A BlockId is a single line block element containing a unique identifier enclosed in double square brackets. It is used to assign an identifier to the ensuing block element for use by referring links. For example:
[[chapter-titles]] Chapter titles can be ...
The preceding example identifies the following paragraph so it can be
linked from other location, for example with
<<chapter-titles,chapter titles>>
.
BlockId elements can be applied to Title, Paragraph, List,
DelimitedBlock, Table and BlockMacro elements. The BlockId element
sets the {id}
attribute for substitution in the subsequent block’s
markup template. If a second argument is supplied it sets the
{reftext}
attribute which is used to set the DocBook xreflabel
attribute.
The BlockId element has the same syntax and serves a similar function to the anchor inline macro.
An AttributeList block element is an attribute list on a line by itself. AttributeList attributes are only applied to the following block element — the attributes are available for markup template substitution. Often the first attribute in the list is used to specify the following element’s style.
By default only attribute references are substituted within attribute values, this is because not all attributes are destined to be marked up and rendered as text (for example the table cols attribute). To perform normal inline text substitutions (special characters, quotes, macros, replacements) on an attribute value you need to enclose it in single quotes. In the following quote block the second attribute value in the AttributeList is quoted to ensure the http macro is expanded to a hyperlink.
[quote,'http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Johnson[Samuel Johnson]'] _____________________________________________________________________ Sir, a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all. _____________________________________________________________________
Paragraphs are blocks of text terminated by a blank line, the end of
file, or the start of a DelimitedBlock. Paragraph markup is specified
by configuration file [paradef*]
sections.
Normal paragraphs consist of one or more non-blank lines of text. The first line must start hard against the left margin (no intervening white space). The default processing expectation is that of a normal paragraph of text. literal and verse paragraph styles are available (in addition to the default paragraph style).
Literal paragraphs are rendered verbatim in a monospaced font without any distinguishing background or border. By default there is no text formatting or substitutions within Literal paragraphs apart from Special Characters and Callouts. For example:
[literal] Consul *necessitatibus* per id, consetetur, eu pro everti postulant homero verear ea mea, qui.
Renders:
Consul *necessitatibus* per id, consetetur, eu pro everti postulant homero verear ea mea, qui.
The verse paragraph style preserves line boundaries and is useful for lyrics and poems. For example:
[verse] Consul *necessitatibus* per id, consetetur, eu pro everti postulant homero verear ea mea, qui.
Renders:
Consul necessitatibus per id,
consetetur, eu pro everti postulant
homero verear ea mea, qui.
Indented paragraphs (the first line indented by one or more space or tab characters) are rendered using the literal paragraph style. For example:
Consul *necessitatibus* per id, consetetur, eu pro everti postulant homero verear ea mea, qui.
Renders:
Consul *necessitatibus* per id, consetetur, eu pro everti postulant homero verear ea mea, qui.
![]() | |
Because lists can be indented it’s possible for your indented paragraph to be misinterpreted as a list — in situations like this apply the literal style to a normal paragraph. |
Tip, Note, Important, Warning and Caution paragraph
definitions support the corresponding DocBook admonishment elements — just write a normal paragraph but place NOTE:
, TIP:
, IMPORTANT:
,
WARNING:
or CAUTION:
as the first word of the paragraph. For
example:
NOTE: This is an example note.
or the alternative syntax:
[NOTE] This is an example note.
Renders:
![]() | |
This is an example note. |
![]() | |
If your admonition is more than a single paragraph use an admonition block instead. |
![]() | |
Admonition customization with |
By default the asciidoc(1)
xhtml11
and html4
backends generate
text captions instead of icon image links. To generate links to icon
images define the icons
attribute, for example using the -a
icons
command-line option.
The iconsdir
attribute sets the location of linked icon
images.
You can override the default icon image using the icon
attribute to
specify the path of the linked image. For example:
[icon="./images/icons/wink.png"] NOTE: What lovely war.
Use the caption
attribute to customize the admonition captions (not
applicable to docbook
backend). The following example suppresses the
icon image and customizes the caption of a NOTE admonition (undefining
the icons
attribute with icons=None
is only necessary if
admonition icons have been enabled):
[icons=None, caption="My Special Note"] NOTE: This is my special note.
This subsection also applies to Admonition Blocks.
Delimited blocks are blocks of text enveloped by leading and trailing
delimiter lines (normally a series of four or more repeated
characters). The behavior of Delimited Blocks is specified by entries
in configuration file [blockdef*]
sections.
AsciiDoc ships with a number of predefined DelimitedBlocks (see the
asciidoc.conf
configuration file in the asciidoc(1)
program
directory):
Predefined delimited block underlines:
CommentBlock: ////////////////////////// PassthroughBlock: ++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ListingBlock: -------------------------- LiteralBlock: .......................... SidebarBlock: ************************** QuoteBlock: __________________________ ExampleBlock: ========================== OpenBlock: --
The code, source and music filter blocks are detailed in the Filters section.
Table 1. Default DelimitedBlock substitutions
Attributes | Callouts | Macros | Quotes | Replacements | Special chars | Special words | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
PassthroughBlock | Yes | No | Yes | No | No | No | No |
ListingBlock | No | Yes | No | No | No | Yes | No |
LiteralBlock | No | Yes | No | No | No | Yes | No |
SidebarBlock | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
QuoteBlock | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
ExampleBlock | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
OpenBlock | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
ListingBlocks are rendered verbatim in a monospaced font, they retain line and whitespace formatting and are often distinguished by a background or border. There is no text formatting or substitutions within Listing blocks apart from Special Characters and Callouts. Listing blocks are often used for computer output and file listings.
Here’s an example:
-------------------------------------- #include <stdio.h> int main() { printf("Hello World!\n"); exit(0); } --------------------------------------
Which will be rendered like:
#include <stdio.h> int main() { printf("Hello World!\n"); exit(0); }
By convention filter blocks use the listing block syntax and are implemented as listing block styles.
LiteralBlocks behave just like LiteralParagraphs except you don’t have to indent the contents.
If the listing style is applied to a LiteralBlock it will be rendered as a ListingBlock (this is handy if you have a listing containing a ListingBlock).
................................... Consul *necessitatibus* per id, consetetur, eu pro everti postulant homero verear ea mea, qui. ...................................
Renders:
Consul *necessitatibus* per id, consetetur, eu pro everti postulant homero verear ea mea, qui.
A sidebar is a short piece of text presented outside the narrative flow of the main text. The sidebar is normally presented inside a bordered box to set it apart from the main text.
The sidebar body is treated like a normal section body.
Here’s an example:
.An Example Sidebar ************************************************ Any AsciiDoc SectionBody element (apart from SidebarBlocks) can be placed inside a sidebar. ************************************************
Which will be rendered like:
Apply the abstract style to generate an abstract, for example:
[abstract] ************************************************ In this paper we will attempt to... ************************************************
The contents of CommentBlocks are not processed; they are useful for annotations and for excluding new or outdated content that you don’t want displayed. CommentBlocks are never written to output files. Example:
////////////////////////////////////////// CommentBlock contents are not processed by asciidoc(1). //////////////////////////////////////////
See also Comment Lines.
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System macros are executed inside comment blocks. |
By default the block contents is subject to attribute and macro substitution, no other markup is generated. PassthroughBlock content will often be backend specific. Here’s an example:
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ <table border="1"><tr> <td>Cell 1</td> <td>Cell 2</td> </tr></table> ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Use and explicit subs attribute to control substitution. The following styles can be applied to passthrough blocks:
QuoteBlocks are used for quoted passages of text. There are two styles: quote and verse. The style is set by the first positional attribute, if no style attribute is specified the quote style. The optional attribution and citetitle attributes (positional attributes 2 and 3) specify the quote’s author and source.
The quote style treats the content like a SectionBody, for example:
[quote, Bertrand Russell, The World of Mathematics (1956)] ____________________________________________________________________ A good notation has subtlety and suggestiveness which at times makes it almost seem like a live teacher. ____________________________________________________________________
Which is rendered as:
A good notation has subtlety and suggestiveness which at times makes it almost seem like a live teacher. | ||
-- Bertrand Russell The World of Mathematics (1956) |
The verse style retains the content’s line breaks, for example:
[verse, William Blake, from Auguries of Innocence] __________________________________________________ To see a world in a grain of sand, And a heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, And eternity in an hour. __________________________________________________
Which is rendered as:
To see a world in a grain of sand, | ||
-- William Blake from Auguries of Innocence |
ExampleBlocks encapsulate the DocBook Example element and are used for, well, examples. Example blocks can be titled by preceding them with a BlockTitle. DocBook toolchains normally number examples and generate a List of Examples backmatter section.
Example blocks are delimited by lines of equals characters and you can put any block elements apart from Titles, BlockTitles and Sidebars) inside an example block. For example:
.An example ===================================================================== Qui in magna commodo, est labitur dolorum an. Est ne magna primis adolescens. =====================================================================
Renders:
A title prefix that can be inserted with the caption
attribute
(xhtml11
and html4
backends). For example:
[caption="Example 1: "] .An example with a custom caption ===================================================================== Qui in magna commodo, est labitur dolorum an. Est ne magna primis adolescens. =====================================================================
The ExampleBlock definition includes a set of admonition styles (NOTE, TIP, IMPORTANT, WARNING, CAUTION) for generating admonition blocks (admonitions containing more than just a simple paragraph). Just precede the ExampleBlock with an attribute list containing the admonition style name. For example:
[NOTE] .A NOTE block ===================================================================== Qui in magna commodo, est labitur dolorum an. Est ne magna primis adolescens. . Fusce euismod commodo velit. . Vivamus fringilla mi eu lacus. .. Fusce euismod commodo velit. .. Vivamus fringilla mi eu lacus. . Donec eget arcu bibendum nunc consequat lobortis. =====================================================================
Renders:
![]() | A NOTE block |
---|---|
Qui in magna commodo, est labitur dolorum an. Est ne magna primis adolescens.
|
See also Admonition Icons and Captions.
An OpenBlock renders the block contents without any opening or closing tags. The open block start and end delimiter is a single line containing two dashes. Enclosed elements are rendered just as they would inside a section body. Open blocks are used for list item continuation.
List types
List behavior
listindex
intrinsic attribute is the current list item
index (1..). If this attribute is not inside a list then it’s value
is the number of items in the most recently closed list. Useful for
displaying the number of items in a list.
Bulleted list items start with a single dash or one to five asterisks followed by some white space then some text. Bulleted list syntaxes are:
- List item. * List item. ** List item. *** List item. **** List item. ***** List item.
List item numbers are explicit or implicit.
Explicit numbering. List items begin with a number followed by some white space then the item text. The numbers can be decimal (arabic), roman (upper or lower case) or alpha (upper or lower case). Decimal and alpha numbers are terminated with a period, roman numbers are terminated with a closing parenthesis. The different terminators are necessary to ensure i, v and x roman numbers are are distinguishable from x, v and x alpha numbers. Examples:
1. Arabic (decimal) numbered list item. a. Lower case alpha (letter) numbered list item. F. Upper case alpha (letter) numbered list item. iii) Lower case roman numbered list item. IX) Upper case roman numbered list item.
Implicit numbering. List items begin one to five period characters, followed by some white space then the item text. Examples:
. Arabic (decimal) numbered list item. .. Lower case alpha (letter) numbered list item. ... Lower case roman numbered list item. .... Upper case alpha (letter) numbered list item. ..... Upper case roman numbered list item.
You can use the style attribute to specify an alternative numbering style. The numbered list style can be one of the following values: arabic, loweralpha, upperalpha, lowerroman, upperroman.
Here are some examples of bulleted and numbered lists:
- Praesent eget purus quis magna eleifend eleifend. 1. Fusce euismod commodo velit. a. Fusce euismod commodo velit. b. Vivamus fringilla mi eu lacus. c. Donec eget arcu bibendum nunc consequat lobortis. 2. Vivamus fringilla mi eu lacus. i) Fusce euismod commodo velit. ii) Vivamus fringilla mi eu lacus. 3. Donec eget arcu bibendum nunc consequat lobortis. 4. Nam fermentum mattis ante. - Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. * Fusce euismod commodo velit. ** Qui in magna commodo, est labitur dolorum an. Est ne magna primis adolescens. Sit munere ponderum dignissim et. Minim luptatum et vel. ** Vivamus fringilla mi eu lacus. * Donec eget arcu bibendum nunc consequat lobortis. - Nulla porttitor vulputate libero. . Fusce euismod commodo velit. . Vivamus fringilla mi eu lacus. [upperroman] .. Fusce euismod commodo velit. .. Vivamus fringilla mi eu lacus. . Donec eget arcu bibendum nunc consequat lobortis.
Which render as:
Praesent eget purus quis magna eleifend eleifend.
Fusce euismod commodo velit.
Vivamus fringilla mi eu lacus.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit.
Fusce euismod commodo velit.
Nulla porttitor vulputate libero.
Vivamus fringilla mi eu lacus.
A predefined compact option is available to bulleted and numbered lists — this translates to the DocBook spacing="compact" lists attribute which may or may not be processed by the DocBook toolchain. Example:
[options="compact"] - Compact list item. - Another compact list item.
![]() | |
To apply the compact option globally define a document-wide
compact-option attribute, e.g. using the |
Labeled list items consist of one or more text labels followed the text of the list item.
An item label begins a line with an alphanumeric character hard against the left margin and ends with one to four colons or two semi-colons. A list item can have multiple labels, one per line.
The list item text consists of one or more lines of text starting after the last label (either on the same line or a new line) and can be followed by nested List or ListParagraph elements. Item text can be optionally indented.
Here are some examples:
In:: Lorem:: Fusce euismod commodo velit. Fusce euismod commodo velit. Ipsum:: Vivamus fringilla mi eu lacus. * Vivamus fringilla mi eu lacus. * Donec eget arcu bibendum nunc consequat lobortis. Dolor:: Donec eget arcu bibendum nunc consequat lobortis. Suspendisse;; A massa id sem aliquam auctor. Morbi;; Pretium nulla vel lorem. In;; Dictum mauris in urna. Vivamus::: Fringilla mi eu lacus. Donec::: Eget arcu bibendum nunc consequat lobortis.
Which render as:
Fusce euismod commodo velit.
Fusce euismod commodo velit.
Vivamus fringilla mi eu lacus.
Donec eget arcu bibendum nunc consequat lobortis.
Dictum mauris in urna.
The horizontal labeled list style places the list text side-by-side with the label instead of under the label. Here is an example:
[horizontal] *Lorem*:: Fusce euismod commodo velit. Qui in magna commodo, est labitur dolorum an. Est ne magna primis adolescens. Fusce euismod commodo velit. *Ipsum*:: Vivamus fringilla mi eu lacus. - Vivamus fringilla mi eu lacus. - Donec eget arcu bibendum nunc consequat lobortis. *Dolor*:: - Vivamus fringilla mi eu lacus. - Donec eget arcu bibendum nunc consequat lobortis.
Which render as:
Lorem |
Fusce euismod commodo velit. Qui in magna commodo, est labitur dolorum an. Est ne magna primis adolescens. Fusce euismod commodo velit. |
Ipsum |
Vivamus fringilla mi eu lacus.
|
Dolor |
|
![]() | |
|
AsciiDoc comes pre-configured with a qanda style labeled list for generating DocBook question and answer (Q&A) lists. Example:
[qanda] Question one:: Answer one. Question two:: Answer two.
Renders:
14.4.1. | Question one |
Answer one. | |
14.4.2. | Question two |
Answer two. |
AsciiDoc comes pre-configured with a glossary style labeled list for generating DocBook glossary lists. Example:
[glossary] A glossary term:: The corresponding definition. A second glossary term:: The corresponding definition.
For working examples see the article.txt
and book.txt
documents in
the AsciiDoc ./doc
distribution directory.
![]() | |
To generate valid DocBook output glossary lists must be located in a glossary section. |
AsciiDoc comes with a predefined bibliography bulleted list style generating DocBook bibliography entries. Example:
[bibliography] - [[[taoup]]] Eric Steven Raymond. 'The Art of UNIX Programming'. Addison-Wesley. ISBN 0-13-142901-9. - [[[walsh-muellner]]] Norman Walsh & Leonard Muellner. 'DocBook - The Definitive Guide'. O'Reilly & Associates. 1999. ISBN 1-56592-580-7.
The [[[<reference>]]]
syntax is a bibliography entry anchor, it
generates an anchor named <reference>
and additionally displays
[<reference>]
at the anchor position. For example [\[[taoup]]]
generates an anchor named taoup
that displays [taoup]
at the
anchor position. Cite the reference from elsewhere your document using
<<taoup>>
, this displays a hyperlink ([taoup]
) to the
corresponding bibliography entry anchor.
For working examples see the article.txt
and book.txt
documents in
the AsciiDoc ./doc
distribution directory.
![]() | |
To generate valid DocBook output bibliography lists must be located in a bibliography section. |
Another list or a literal paragraph immediately following a list item is implicitly appended to the list item; to append other block elements to a list item you need to explicitly join them to the list item with a list continuation (a separator line containing a single plus character). Multiple block elements can be appended to a list item using list continuations (provided they are legal list item children in the backend markup).
Here are some examples of list item continuations: list item one contains multiple continuations; list item two is continued with an OpenBlock containing multiple elements:
1. List item one. + List item one continued with a second paragraph followed by an Indented block. + ................. $ ls *.sh $ mv *.sh ~/tmp ................. + List item continued with a third paragraph. 2. List item two continued with an open block. + -- This paragraph is part of the preceding list item. a. This list is nested and does not require explicit item continuation. + This paragraph is part of the preceding list item. b. List item b. This paragraph belongs to item two of the outer list. --
Renders:
List item one.
List item one continued with a second paragraph followed by an Indented block.
$ ls *.sh $ mv *.sh ~/tmp
List item continued with a third paragraph.
List item two continued with an open block.
This paragraph is part of the preceding list item.
This list is nested and does not require explicit item continuation.
This paragraph is part of the preceding list item.
This paragraph belongs to item two of the outer list.
The shipped AsciiDoc configuration includes the footnote:[<text>]
and footnoteref:[<id>,<text>]
inline macros for generating
footnotes:
footnote
macro generates a footnote.
footnoteref
macro has two forms: if the text is supplied a
foot note with an ID is generated; if the text is omitted a
reference to the footnote with the specified ID is generated.
Example footnote:
A footnote footnote:[An example footnote.]; a second footnote with a reference ID footnoteref:[note2,Second footnote.]; finally a reference to the second footnote footnoteref:[note2].
Which renders:
A footnote [2]; a second footnote with a reference ID [3]; finally a reference to the second footnote [3].
Footnotes are primarily useful when generating DocBook output — DocBook conversion programs render footnote outside the primary text flow.
The shipped AsciiDoc configuration includes the inline macros for generating document index entries.
indexterm:[<primary>,<secondary>,<tertiary>]
,
(((<primary>,<secondary>,<tertiary>)))
indexterm:[Tigers,Big cats]
(or, using the alternative syntax
(((Tigers,Big cats)))
. Index terms that have secondary and
tertiary entries also generate separate index terms for the
secondary and tertiary entries. The index terms appear in the
index, not the primary text flow.
indexterm2:[<primary>]
,
((<primary>))
<primary>
should not be
padded to the left or right with white space characters.
For working examples see the article.txt
and book.txt
documents in
the AsciiDoc ./doc
distribution directory.
![]() | |
Index entries only really make sense if you are generating DocBook markup — DocBook conversion programs automatically generate an index at the point an Index section appears in source document. |
Callouts are a mechanism for annotating verbatim text (source code, computer output and user input for example). Callout markers are placed inside the annotated text while the actual annotations are presented in a callout list after the annotated text. Here’s an example:
.MS-DOS directory listing ----------------------------------------------------- 10/17/97 9:04 <DIR> bin 10/16/97 14:11 <DIR> DOS <1> 10/16/97 14:40 <DIR> Program Files 10/16/97 14:46 <DIR> TEMP 10/17/97 9:04 <DIR> tmp 10/16/97 14:37 <DIR> WINNT 10/16/97 14:25 119 AUTOEXEC.BAT <2> 2/13/94 6:21 54,619 COMMAND.COM <2> 10/16/97 14:25 115 CONFIG.SYS <2> 11/16/97 17:17 61,865,984 pagefile.sys 2/13/94 6:21 9,349 WINA20.386 <3> ----------------------------------------------------- <1> This directory holds MS-DOS. <2> System startup code for DOS. <3> Some sort of Windows 3.1 hack.
Which renders:
Example 2. MS-DOS directory listing
10/17/97 9:04 <DIR> bin 10/16/97 14:11 <DIR> DOS10/16/97 14:40 <DIR> Program Files 10/16/97 14:46 <DIR> TEMP 10/17/97 9:04 <DIR> tmp 10/16/97 14:37 <DIR> WINNT 10/16/97 14:25 119 AUTOEXEC.BAT
2/13/94 6:21 54,619 COMMAND.COM
10/16/97 14:25 115 CONFIG.SYS
11/16/97 17:17 61,865,984 pagefile.sys 2/13/94 6:21 9,349 WINA20.386
Explanation
<n>
, n>
or >
where n
is the optional list item
number (in the latter case list items starting with a single >
character are implicitly numbered starting at one).
![]() | |
To include callout icons in PDF files generated by
|
Callout marks are generated by the callout inline macro while callout lists are generated using the callout list definition. The callout macro and callout list are special in that they work together. The callout inline macro is not enabled by the normal macros substitutions option, instead it has its own callouts substitution option.
The following attributes are available during inline callout macro substitution:
{index}
{coid}
CO<listnumber>-<index>
that
uniquely identifies the callout mark. For example CO2-4
identifies the fourth callout mark in the second set of callout
marks.
The {coids}
attribute can be used during callout list item
substitution — it is a space delimited list of callout IDs that refer
to the explanatory list item.
You can annotate working code examples with callouts — just remember
to put the callouts inside source code comments. This example displays
the test.py
source file (containing a single callout) using the
Source Code Highlighter Filter:
Example 3. AsciiDoc source
[source,python] ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ include::test.py[] ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ <1> Print statement.
Macros are a mechanism for substituting parametrized text into output documents.
Macros have a name, a single target argument and an attribute
list. The usual syntax is <name>:<target>[<attrlist>]
(for
inline macros) and <name>::<target>[<attrlist>]
(for block
macros). Here are some examples:
http://www.methods.co.nz/asciidoc/index.html[Asciidoc home page] include::chapt1.txt[tabsize=2] mailto:srackham@gmail.com[]
Macro behavior
<name>
is the macro name. It can only contain letters, digits or
dash characters and cannot start with a dash.
<target>
cannot contain white space characters.
<attrlist>
is a list of attributes enclosed in square
brackets.
]
characters in attribute lists that are enclosed in []
brackets
must be escaped with a backslash.
<name>
, <target>
and <attrlist>
the
<passtext>
and <subslist>
named groups are available to
passthrough macros. A macro is a passthrough macro if the
definition includes a <passtext>
named group.
Inline Macros occur in an inline element context. Predefined Inline macros include URLs, image and link macros.
http, https, ftp, file, mailto and callto URLs are rendered using predefined inline macros.
<attrlist>
is empty the URL is displayed.
Here are some examples:
http://www.methods.co.nz/asciidoc/[The AsciiDoc home page] http://www.methods.co.nz/asciidoc/ mailto:joe.bloggs@foobar.com[email Joe Bloggs] joe.bloggs@foobar.com callto:joe.bloggs[]
Which are rendered:
http://www.methods.co.nz/asciidoc/
<target>
necessitates space characters they should be
replaced by %20
. For example large%20image.png
.
Two AsciiDoc inline macros are provided for creating hypertext links within an AsciiDoc document. You can use either the standard macro syntax or the (preferred) alternative.
Used to specify hypertext link targets:
[[<id>,<xreflabel>]] anchor:<id>[<xreflabel>]
The <id>
is a unique identifier that must begin with a letter. The
optional <xreflabel>
is the text to be displayed by captionless
xref macros that refer to this anchor. The optional <xreflabel>
is
only really useful when generating DocBook output. Example anchor:
[[X1]]
You may have noticed that the syntax of this inline element is the same as that of the BlockId block element, this is no coincidence since they are functionally equivalent.
Creates a hypertext link to a document anchor.
<<<id>,<caption>>> xref:<id>[<caption>]
The <id>
refers to an existing anchor <id>
. The optional
<caption>
is the link’s displayed text. Example:
<<X21,attribute lists>>
If <caption>
is not specified then the displayed text is
auto-generated:
xhtml11
backend displays the <id>
enclosed in
square brackets.
Here is an example:
[[tiger_image]] .Tyger tyger image::tiger.png[] This can be seen in <<tiger_image>>.
Hypertext links to files on the local file system are specified using the link inline macro.
link:<target>[<caption>]
The link macro generates relative URLs. The link macro <target>
is
the target file name (relative to the file system location of the
referring document). The optional <caption>
is the link’s displayed
text. If <caption>
is not specified then <target>
is displayed.
Example:
link:downloads/foo.zip[download foo.zip]
You can use the <filename>#<id>
syntax to refer to an anchor within
a target document but this usually only makes sense when targeting
HTML documents.
Images can serve as hyperlinks using the image
macro.
Inline images are inserted into the output document using the image macro. The inline syntax is:
image:<target>[<attributes>]
The contents of the image file <target>
is displayed. To display the
image its file format must be supported by the target backend
application. HTML and DocBook applications normally support PNG or JPG
files.
<target>
file name paths are relative to the location of the
referring document.
Image macro attributes
The optional first positional attribute list entry specifies the alternative text which is displayed if the output application is unable to process the image file. For example:
image:images/logo.png[Company Logo]
The optional width
and height
attributes scale the image size
and can be used in any combination. The units are pixels. The
following example scales the previous example to a height of 32
pixels:
image:images/logo.png["Company Logo",height=32]
The optional link
attribute is used to link the image to an
external document. The following example links a screenshot
thumbnail to a full size version:
image:screen-thumbnail.png[height=32,link="screen.png"]
The optional scaledwidth
attribute is only used in DocBook block
images (specifically for PDF documents). The following example
scales the images to 75% of the available print width:
image::images/logo.png["Company Logo",scaledwidth="75%"]
The optional align
attribute is used for horizontal image
alignment in DocBook block images (specifically for PDF documents).
Allowed values are center
, left
and right
. For example:
image::images/tiger.png["Tiger image",align="left"]
See comment block macro.
A Block macro reference must be contained in a single line separated either side by a blank line or a block delimiter.
Block macros behave just like Inline macros, with the following differences:
<name>::<target>[<attrlist>]
(two
colons, not one).
-blockmacro
instead of
-inlinemacro
.
The Block Identifier macro sets the id
attribute and has the same
syntax as the anchor inline macro since it performs
essentially the same function — block templates employ the id
attribute as a block link target. For example:
[[X30]]
This is equivalent to the [id="X30"]
block attribute list.
Formal titled images are inserted into the output document using the image macro. The syntax is:
image::<target>[<attributes>]
The block image
macro has the same macro attributes as its
inline counterpart.
Images can be titled by preceding the image
macro with a
BlockTitle. DocBook toolchains normally number examples and
generate a List of Figures backmatter section.
For example:
.Main circuit board image::images/layout.png[J14P main circuit board]
A title prefix that can be inserted with the caption
attribute
(xhtml11
and html4
backends). For example:
.Main circuit board [caption="Figure 2: "] image::images/layout.png[J14P main circuit board]
Single lines starting with two forward slashes hard up against the left margin are treated as comments. Comment lines do not appear in the output unless the showcomments attribute is defined. Comment lines have been implemented as both block and inline macros so a comment line can appear as a standalone block or within block elements that support inline macro expansion. Example comment line:
// This is a comment.
If the showcomments attribute is defined comment lines are written to the output:
System macros are block macros that perform a predefined task and are
hardwired into the asciidoc(1)
program.
asciidoc(1)
so they don’t appear in configuration files. You can
however customize the syntax by adding entries to a configuration
file [macros]
section.
The include
and include1
system macros to include the contents of
a named file into the source document.
The include
macro includes a file as if it were part of the parent
document — tabs are expanded and system macros processed. The
contents of include1
files are not subject to tab expansion or
system macro processing nor are attribute or lower priority
substitutions performed. The include1
macro’s intended use is to
include verbatim embedded CSS or scripts into configuration file
headers. Example:
include::chapter1.txt[tabsize=4]
Include macro behavior
include1
macro).
include1
macro which
does not process nested includes). Setting depth to one disables
nesting inside the included file. By default, nesting is limited to
a depth of five.
include1
macro is translated to the include1
system attribute which means it must be evaluated in a region where
attribute substitution is enabled. To inhibit nested substitution in
included files it is preferable to use the include
macro and set
the attribute depth=1
.
Lines of text in the source document can be selectively included or
excluded from processing based on the existence (or not) of a document
attribute. There are two conditional inclusion macros; the first
includes document text between the ifdef
and endif
macros if a
document attribute is defined:
ifdef::<attribute>[] : endif::<attribute>[]
The second includes document text between the ifndef
and endif
macros if the attribute is not defined:
ifndef::<attribute>[] : endif::<attribute>[]
<attribute>
is an attribute name which is optional in the trailing
endif
macro.
If you only want to process a single line of text then the text can be
put inside the square brackets and the endif
macro omitted, for
example:
ifdef::revision[Version number 42]
Is equivalent to:
ifdef::revision[] Version number 42 endif::revision[]
Take a look at the *.conf
configuration files in the AsciiDoc
distribution for examples of conditional inclusion macro usage.
These block macros exhibit the same behavior as their same named system attribute references. The difference is that system macros occur in a block macro context whereas system attributes are confined to an inline context where attribute substitution is enabled.
The following example displays a long directory listing inside a literal block:
------------------ sys::[ls -l *.txt] ------------------
The template
block macro allows the inclusion of one configuration
file template section within another. The following example includes
the [admonitionblock]
section in the [admonitionparagraph]
section:
[admonitionparagraph] template::[admonitionblock]
Template macro behavior
template::[]
macro is useful for factoring configuration file
markup.
template::[]
macros cannot be nested.
template::[]
macro expansion is applied to all sections
after all configuration files have been read.
Passthrough macros are analogous to passthrough blocks and are
used to pass text directly to the output. The substitution performed
on the text is determined by the macro definition but can be overridden
by the <subslist>
. The usual syntax is
<name>:<subslist>[<passtext>]
(for inline macros) and
<name>::<subslist>[<passtext>]
(for block macros).
Inline and block. Passes text unmodified apart from explicitly specified substitutions). Examples:
pass:[<q>To be or not to be</q>] pass:attributes,quotes[<u>the '{author}'</u>]
Inline and block. The triple-plus passthrough is functionally
identical to the pass macro but you don’t have to escape ]
characters and you can prefix with quoted attributes in the inline
version. Example:
Red [red]+++`sum_(i=1)\^n i=(n(n+1))/2`$+++ AsciiMathML formula
Inline and block. The double-dollar passthrough is functionally identical with one exception: special characters are escaped. Example:
$$`[[a,b],[c,d]]((n),(k))`$$
Each entry in the configuration [macros]
section is a macro
definition which can take one of the following forms:
<pattern>=<name>[<subslist]
<pattern>=#<name>[<subslist]
<pattern>=+<name>[<subslist]
<pattern>
<pattern>
.
<pattern>
is a Python regular expression and <name>
is the name of
a markup template. If <name>
is omitted then it is the value of the
regular expression match group named name. The optional
[<subslist]
is a comma-separated list of substitution names enclosed
in []
brackets, it sets the default substitutions for passthrough
text, if omitted then no passthrough substitutions are performed.
Pattern named groups. The following named groups can be used in macro <pattern>
regular
expressions and are available as markup template attributes:
Here’s what happens during macro substitution
[macros]
section is matched against the input source line.
<name>-inlinemacro
or <name>-blockmacro
(depending on the macro
type).
The AsciiDoc table syntax looks and behaves like other delimited block types and supports standard block configuration entries. Formatting is easy to read and, just as importantly, easy to enter.
Table 3. Columns formatted with strong, monospaced and emphasis styles
Columns 2 and 3 | ||
---|---|---|
footer 1 |
| footer 3 |
1 |
| Item 1 |
2 |
| Item 2 |
3 |
| Item 3 |
4 |
| Item 4 |
Example 6. AsciiDoc source
.An example table [width="50%",cols=">s,^m,e",frame="topbot",options="header,footer"] |========================== | 2+|Columns 2 and 3 |1 |Item 1 |Item 1 |2 |Item 2 |Item 2 |3 |Item 3 |Item 3 |4 |Item 4 |Item 4 |footer 1|footer 2|footer 3 |==========================
Table 4. Horizontal and vertical source data
Date | Duration | Avg HR | Notes |
---|---|---|---|
22-Aug-08 | 10:24 | 157 | Worked out MSHR (max sustainable heart rate) by going hard for this interval. |
22-Aug-08 | 23:03 | 152 | Back-to-back with previous interval. |
24-Aug-08 | 40:00 | 145 | Moderately hard interspersed with 3x 3min intervals (2min hard + 1min really hard taking the HR up to 160). |
Short cells can be entered horizontally, longer cells vertically. The default behavior is to strip leading and trailing blank lines within a cell. These characteristics aid readability and data entry.
Example 7. AsciiDoc source
.Windtrainer workouts [width="80%",cols="3,^2,^2,10",options="header"] |========================================================= |Date |Duration |Avg HR |Notes |22-Aug-08 |10:24 | 157 | Worked out MSHR (max sustainable heart rate) by going hard for this interval. |22-Aug-08 |23:03 | 152 | Back-to-back with previous interval. |24-Aug-08 |40:00 | 145 | Moderately hard interspersed with 3x 3min intervals (2min hard + 1min really hard taking the HR up to 160). |=========================================================
Table 5. A table with externally sourced CSV data
ID | Customer Name | Contact Name | Customer Address | Phone |
---|---|---|---|---|
AROUT | Around the Horn | Thomas Hardy | 120 Hanover Sq. London | (171) 555-7788 |
BERGS | Berglunds snabbkop | Christina Berglund | Berguvsvagen 8 Lulea | 0921-12 34 65 |
BLAUS | Blauer See Delikatessen | Hanna Moos | Forsterstr. 57 Mannheim | 0621-08460 |
BLONP | Blondel pere et fils | Frederique Citeaux | 24, place Kleber Strasbourg | 88.60.15.31 |
BOLID | Bolido Comidas preparadas | Martin Sommer | C/ Araquil, 67 Madrid | (91) 555 22 82 |
BONAP | Bon app' | Laurence Lebihan | 12, rue des Bouchers Marseille | 91.24.45.40 |
BOTTM | Bottom-Dollar Markets | Elizabeth Lincoln | 23 Tsawassen Blvd. Tsawassen | (604) 555-4729 |
BSBEV | B’s Beverages | Victoria Ashworth | Fauntleroy Circus London | (171) 555-1212 |
CACTU | Cactus Comidas para llevar | Patricio Simpson | Cerrito 333 Buenos Aires | (1) 135-5555 |
Example 8. AsciiDoc source
[format="csv",cols="^1,4*2",options="header"] |=================================================== ID,Customer Name,Contact Name,Customer Address,Phone include::customers.csv[] |===================================================
Example 9. AsciiDoc source
[cols="e,m,^,>s",width="25%"] |============================ |1 >s|2 |3 |4 ^|5 2.2+^.^|6 .3+<.>m|7 ^|8 |9 2+>|10 |============================
AsciiDoc table data can be psv, dsv or csv formatted. The default table format is psv.
AsciiDoc psv (Prefix Separated Values) and dsv (Delimiter Separated Values) formats are cell oriented — the table is treated as a sequence of cells — there are no explicit row separators.
:|\n
(a colon or a line break).
Here are four psv cells (the second item spans two columns; the last contains an escaped separator):
|One 2+|Two and three |A \| separator character
csv is the quasi-standard row oriented Comma Separated Values (CSV) format commonly used to import and export spreadsheet and database data.
Individual tables are customized by an optional AttributeList preceding the table. Specify attributes when you want to change the default table format:
The cols attribute is a comma separated list of column specifiers. For example cols="2<p,2*,4p,>"
.
cols=4
.
Column specifiers define how columns are rendered and appear in the table cols attribute. A column specifier consists of an optional column multiplier followed by optional alignment, width and style values and is formatted like:
[<multiplier>*][<align>][<width>][<style>]
<align>
or <width>
is not important.
<width>
can be either an integer proportional value (1…)
or a percentage (1%…100%). The default value is 1. To ensure
portability across different backends, there is no provision for
absolute column widths (not to be confused with output column width
markup attributes which are available in both percentage and
absolute units).
The <align> column alignment specifier is formatted like:
[<horizontal>][.<vertical>]
Where <horizontal>
and <vertical>
are one of the following
characters: <
, ^
or >
which represent left
, center
and
right
horizontal alignment or top
, middle
and bottom
vertical
alignment respectively.
<multiplier>
can be used to specify repeated columns e.g.
cols="4*<"
specifies four left-justified columns. Default value 1.
<style>
name specifies a table style to used to markup
column cells (you can use the full style names if you wish but the
first letter is normally sufficient).
Cell specifiers allow individual cells in psv formatted tables to be
spanned, multiplied, aligned and styled. Cell specifiers prefix psv
|
delimiters and are formatted like:
[<span>*|+][<align>][<style>]
<span> specifies horizontal and vertical cell spans (+ operator) or the number of times the cell is replicated (* operator). <span> is formatted like:
[<colspan>][.<rowspan>]
Where <colspan>
and <rowspan>
are integers specifying the number of
columns and rows to span.
<align>
specifies horizontal and vertical cell alignment an is the
same as in column specifiers.
<style>
value is the first letter of table style name.
For example, the following psv formatted cell will span two columns and the text will be centered and emphasized:
`2+^e| Cell text`
Table styles can be applied to the entire table (by setting the style attribute in the table’s attribute list) or on a per column basis (by specifying the style in the table’s cols attribute). Tables come with the following predefined styles:
asciidoc(1)
as a filter to process cell contents. See also Docbook table limitations.
AsciiDoc makes a number of attributes available to table markup templates and tags. Both absolute and percentage width values are available. Column specific attributes are available when substituting the colspec cell data tags.
An alternative table syntax using a ! character instead of a |
character is provided to allow a single level of table nesting.
Columns containing nested tables must use the asciidoc style. An
example can be found in ./examples/website/newtables.txt
.
Fully implementing tables is not trivial, some DocBook toolchains do better than others. AsciiDoc HTML table outputs are rendered correctly in all the popular browsers — if your DocBook generated tables don’t look right compare them with the output generated by the AsciiDoc xhtml11 backend or try a different DocBook toolchain. Here is a list of things to be aware of:
Although nested tables are not legal in DocBook 4 the FOP and
dblatex toolchains will process them correctly. If you use a2x(1)
you will need to include the --no-xmllint
option to suppress
DocBook validation errors.
![]() | |
Technically you can nest DocBook 4 tables one level using the entrytbl element, but not all toolchains process entrytbl. |
a2x(1)
try the --no-xmllint
option, toolchains will often process nested block elements such as
sidebar blocks and floating titles correctly.
Sooner or later, if you program for a UNIX environment, you’re going to have to write a man page.
By observing a couple of additional conventions you can compose AsciiDoc files that will translate to a DocBook refentry (man page) document. The resulting DocBook file can then be translated to the native roff man page format (or other formats).
For example, the asciidoc.1.txt
file in the AsciiDoc distribution
./doc
directory was used to generate both the
asciidoc.1.css-embedded.html
HTML file the asciidoc.1
roff
formatted asciidoc(1)
man page.
To find out more about man pages view the man(7)
manpage
(man 7 man
and man man-pages
commands).
A document Header is mandatory. The title line contains the man page name followed immediately by the manual section number in brackets, for example ASCIIDOC(1). The title name should not contain white space and the manual section number is a single digit optionally followed by a single character.
The first manpage section is mandatory, must be titled NAME and must contain a single paragraph (usually a single line) consisting of a list of one or more comma separated command name(s) separated from the command purpose by a dash character. The dash must have at least one white space character on either side. For example:
printf, fprintf, sprintf - print formatted output
In addition to the automatically created man page intrinsic attributes you can assign DocBook
refmiscinfo
element source, version and manual values using AsciiDoc
{mansource}
, {manversion}
and {manmanual}
attributes
respectively. This example is from the AsciiDoc header of a man page
source file:
:man source: AsciiDoc :man version: {revision} :man manual: AsciiDoc Manual
The asciimath and latexmath passthrough macros along with asciimath and latexmath passthrough blocks provide a (backend dependent) mechanism for rendering mathematical formulas. You can use the following math markups:
![]() | |
The latexmath macro used to include LaTeX Math in DocBook outputs is not the same as the latexmath macro used to include LaTeX MathML in XHTML outputs. LaTeX Math applies to DocBook outputs that are processed by dblatex and is normally used to generate PDF files. LaTeXMathML is very much a subset of LaTeX Math and applies to XHTML documents. |
LaTeX math can be included in documents that are processed by dblatex(1). Example inline formula:
latexmath:[$C = \alpha + \beta Y^{\gamma} + \epsilon$]
For more examples see the AsciiDoc
website or the distributed doc/latexmath.txt
file.
ASCIIMathML
formulas can be included in XHTML documents generated using the
xhtml11 backend. To enable ASCIIMathML support you must define the
asciimath attribute, for example using the -a asciimath
command-line option. Example inline formula:
asciimath:[`x/x={(1,if x!=0),(text{undefined},if x=0):}`]
For more examples see the AsciiDoc
website or the distributed doc/asciimathml.txt
file.
LaTeXMathML allows LaTeX Math style formulas to be included in XHTML
documents generated using the AsciiDoc xhtml11 backend. AsciiDoc
uses the
original
LaTeXMathML by Douglas Woodall. LaTeXMathML is derived from
ASCIIMathML and is for users who are more familiar with or prefer
using LaTeX math formulas (it recognizes a subset of LaTeX Math, the
differences are documented on the LaTeXMathML web page). To enable
LaTeXMathML support you must define the latexmath attribute, for
example using the -a latexmath
command-line option. Example inline
formula:
latexmath:[$\sum_{n=1}^\infty \frac{1}{2^n}$]
For more examples see the AsciiDoc
website or the distributed doc/latexmathml.txt
file.
There are more examples on the AsciiDoc website.
MathML is a low level XML markup for mathematics. AsciiDoc has no macros for MathML but users familiar with this markup could use passthrough macros and passthrough blocks to include MathML in output documents.
AsciiDoc source file syntax and output file markup is largely controlled by a set of cascading, text based, configuration files. At runtime The AsciiDoc default configuration files are combined with optional user and document specific configuration files.
Configuration files contain named sections. Each section begins with a section name in square brackets []. The section body consists of the lines of text between adjacent section headings.
![]() | |
When creating custom configuration files you only need to include the sections and entries that differ from the default configuration. |
![]() | |
The best way to learn about configuration files is to read the
default configuration files in the AsciiDoc distribution in
conjunction with |
AsciiDoc reserves the following section names for specific purposes:
Each line of text in these sections is a section entry. Section entries share the following syntax:
Section entry behavior
name
must be escaped with a
backslash character.
name
and value
are stripped of leading and trailing white space.
The optional [miscellaneous]
section specifies the following
name=value
options:
Output file line termination characters. Can include any
valid Python string escape sequences. The default value is
\r\n
(carriage return, line feed). Should not be quoted or
contain explicit spaces (use \x20
instead). For example:
$ asciidoc -a 'newline=\n' -b docbook mydoc.txt
outfilesuffix=.html
. Defaults to backend name.
tabsize=4
. Defaults to 8. A tabsize of zero suppresses tab
expansion (useful when piping included files through block
filters). Included files can override this option using the
tabsize attribute.
![]() | |
|
A comma separated list of document and section title underline character pairs starting with the section level 0 and ending with section level 4 underline. The default setting is:
underlines="==","--","~~","^^","++"
The [tags]
section contains backend tag definitions (one per
line). Tags are used to translate AsciiDoc elements to backend
markup.
An AsciiDoc tag definition is formatted like
<tagname>=<starttag>|<endtag>
. For example:
emphasis=<em>|</em>
In this example asciidoc(1)
replaces the | character with the
emphasized text from the AsciiDoc input file and writes the result to
the output file.
Use the {brvbar}
attribute reference if you need to include a | pipe
character inside tag text.
The optional [attributes]
section contains predefined attributes.
If the attribute value requires leading or trailing spaces then the text text should be enclosed in quotation mark (") characters.
To delete a attribute insert a name!
entry in a downstream
configuration file or use the asciidoc(1)
--attribute name!
command-line option (an attribute name suffixed with a !
character
deletes the attribute)
The [specialcharacters]
section specifies how to escape characters
reserved by the backend markup. Each translation is specified on a
single line formatted like:
special_character=translated_characters
Special characters are normally confined to those that resolve
markup ambiguity (in the case of SGML/XML markups the ampersand, less
than and greater than characters). The following example causes all
occurrences of the <
character to be replaced by <
.
<=<
Quoting is used primarily for text formatting. The [quotes]
section
defines AsciiDoc quoting characters and their corresponding backend
markup tags. Each section entry value is the name of a of a [tags]
section entry. The entry name is the character (or characters) that
quote the text. The following examples are taken from AsciiDoc
configuration files:
[quotes] _=emphasis
[tags] emphasis=<em>|</em>
You can specify the left and right quote strings separately by separating them with a | character, for example:
``|''=quoted
Omitting the tag will disable quoting, for example, if you don’t want
superscripts or subscripts put the following in a custom configuration
file or edit the global asciidoc.conf
configuration file:
[quotes] ^= ~=
Unconstrained quotes are differentiated by prefixing the tag name with a hash character, for example:
__=#emphasis
Quoted text behavior
The [specialwords]
section is used to single out words and phrases
that you want to consistently format in some way throughout your
document without having to repeatedly specify the markup. The name of
each entry corresponds to a markup template section and the entry
value consists of a list of words and phrases to be marked up. For
example:
[specialwords] strongwords=NOTE: IMPORTANT:
[strongwords] <strong>{words}</strong>
The examples specifies that any occurrence of NOTE:
or IMPORTANT:
should appear in a bold font.
Words and word phrases are treated as Python regular expressions: for
example, the word ^NOTE:
would only match NOTE:
if appeared at
the start of a line.
AsciiDoc comes with three built-in Special Word types: emphasizedwords, monospacedwords and strongwords, each has a corresponding (backend specific) markup template section. Edit the configuration files to customize existing Special Words and to add new ones.
Special word behavior
[specialwords]
section entry of the form
name=word1 [word2…]
adds words to existing name
entries.
[specialwords]
section entry of the form name
undefines
(deletes) all existing name
words.
foobar
would be expanded inside the macro call
http://www.foobar.com[]
. A possible solution is to emphasize
whole words only by defining the word using regular expression
characters, for example \bfoobar\b
.
\\?\b[Tt]en\b
will mark up the words Ten
and
ten
only if they are not preceded by a backslash.
[replacements]
and [replacements2]
configuration file entries
specify find and replace text and are formatted like:
find_pattern=replacement_text
The find text can be a Python regular expression; the replace text can contain Python regular expression group references.
Use Replacement shortcuts for often used macro references, for example (the second replacement allows us to backslash escape the macro name):
NEW!=image:./images/smallnew.png[New!] \\NEW!=NEW!
Replacement behavior
Markup template sections supply backend markup for translating AsciiDoc elements. Since the text is normally backend dependent you’ll find these sections in the backend specific configuration files. Template sections differ from other sections in that they contain a single block of text instead of per line name=value entries. A markup template section body can contain:
The document content placeholder is a single | character and is
replaced by text from the source element. Use the {brvbar}
attribute reference if you need a literal | character in the template.
Configuration files have a .conf
file name extension; they are
loaded implicitly (using predefined file names and locations) or
explicitly (using the asciidoc(1)
-f
(--conf-file
) command-line
option).
Implicit configuration files are loaded from the following directories in the following order:
/etc/asciidoc
or
/usr/local/etc/asciidoc
) if it exists.
$HOME/.asciidoc
directory (if it exists).
The following implicit configuration files from each of the above locations are loaded in the following order:
asciidoc.conf
<backend>.conf
<backend>-<doctype>.conf
lang-<lang>.conf
Where <backend>
and <doctype>
are values specified by the
asciidoc(1)
-b
(--backend
) and -d
(--doctype
) command-line
options. <lang>
is the value of the AsciiDoc lang
attribute
(defaults to en
(English)).
Finally, configuration files named like the source file will be
automatically loaded if they are found in the source file directory.
For example if the source file is mydoc.txt
and the
--backend=html4
option is used then asciidoc(1)
will look for
mydoc.conf
and mydoc-html4.conf
in that order.
Implicit configuration files that don’t exist will be silently skipped.
The user can explicitly specify additional configuration files using
the asciidoc(1)
-f
(--conf-file
) command-line option. The -f
option can be specified multiple times, in which case configuration
files will be processed in the order they appear on the command-line.
For example, when we translate our AsciiDoc document mydoc.txt
with:
$ asciidoc -f extra.conf mydoc.txt
Configuration files (if they exist) will be processed in the following order:
First default global configuration files from the asciidoc program directory are loaded:
asciidoc.conf xhtml11.conf
Then, from the users home ~/.asciidoc
directory. This is were
you put customization specific to your own asciidoc documents:
asciidoc.conf xhtml11.conf xhtml11-article.conf
Next from the source document project directory (the first three apply to all documents in the directory, the last two are specific to the mydoc.txt document):
asciidoc.conf xhtml11.conf xhtml11-article.conf mydoc.conf mydoc-xhtml11.conf
Finally the file specified by the -f
command-line option is
loaded:
extra.conf
![]() | |
Use the |
A document attribute is comprised of a name and a textual value and is used for textual substitution in AsciiDoc documents and configuration files. An attribute reference (an attribute name enclosed in braces) is replaced by its corresponding attribute value.
There are four sources of document attributes (from highest to lowest precedence):
[attributes]
sections.
Within each of these divisions the last processed entry takes precedence.
![]() | |
If an attribute is not defined then the line containing the attribute reference is dropped. This property is used extensively in AsciiDoc configuration files to facilitate conditional markup generation. |
The AttributeEntry
block element allows document attributes to be
assigned within an AsciiDoc document. Attribute entries are added to
the global document attributes dictionary. The attribute name/value
syntax is a single line like:
:<name>: <value>
For example:
:Author Initials: JB
This will set an attribute reference {authorinitials}
to the value
JB in the current document.
To delete (undefine) an attribute use the following syntax:
:<name>!:
AttributeEntry behavior
<name>
to a legal attribute name (lower
case, alphanumeric and dash characters only — all other characters
deleted). This allows more reader friendly text to be used.
<value>
.
<value>
is blank then the corresponding attribute value is
set to an empty string.
<value>
are substituted. You can
enter special characters using character entity values, for example
&
.
<value>
will be
expanded.
specialcharacters
and attributes
(see above), if you want a
different AttributeEntry substitution set the attributeentry-subs
attribute.
AsciiDoc User Manual ==================== :Author: Stuart Rackham :Email: srackham@gmail.com :Date: April 23, 2004 :Revision: 5.1.1 :Key words: linux, ralink, debian, wireless :Revision history:
Which creates these attributes:
{author}, {firstname}, {lastname}, {authorinitials}, {email}, {date}, {revision}, {keywords}, {revisionhistory}
The preceding example is equivalent to the standard AsciiDoc two line
document header. Actually it’s a little bit different with the
addition of the {keywords}
and {revisionhistory}
attributes
[4].
A variant of the Attribute Entry syntax allows configuration file entries to be set from within an AsciiDoc document:
:<section_name>.<entry_name>: <entry_value>
Where <section_name>
is the configuration section name,
<entry_name>
is the name of the entry and <entry_value>
is the
optional entry value. This example sets the default labeled list style
to horizontal:
:listdef-labeled.style: horizontal
It is exactly equivalent to a configuration file containing:
[listdef-labeled] style=horizontal
An attribute list is a comma separated list of attribute values. The entire list is enclosed in square brackets. Attribute lists are used to pass parameters to macros, blocks and inline quotes:
Here are three examples (a single unquoted positional attribute; three unquoted attribute values; one positional attribute followed by two named attributes):
[Hello] [quote, Bertrand Russell, The World of Mathematics (1956)] ["22 times", backcolor="#0e0e0e", options="noborders,wide"]
Attribute list behavior
None
undefines the attribute.
{1}
,{2}
,{3}
,…
{0}
refers to the entire list (excluding the enclosing
square brackets).
If the attribute list contains an attribute named options
it is
processed as a comma separated list of option names:
<option>-option
(where
<option>
is the option name) with an empty string value. For
example [options="opt1,opt2,opt3"]
is equivalent to setting the
following three attributes
[opt1-option="",opt2-option="",opt2-option=""]
.
An attribute references is an attribute name (possibly followed by an additional parameters) enclosed in braces. When an attribute reference is encountered it is evaluated and replaced by its corresponding text value. If the attribute is undefined the line containing the attribute is dropped.
There are three types of attribute reference: Simple, Conditional and System.
Attribute reference behavior
Simple attribute references take the form {<name>}
. If the
attribute name is defined its text value is substituted otherwise the
line containing the reference is dropped from the output.
Additional parameters are used in conjunction with the attribute name to calculate a substitution value. Conditional attribute references take the following forms:
{<name>=<value>}
<value>
is substituted if the attribute <name>
is
undefined otherwise its value is substituted. <value>
can
contain simple attribute references.
{<name>?<value>}
<value>
is substituted if the attribute <name>
is defined
otherwise an empty string is substituted. <value>
can
contain simple attribute references.
{<name>!<value>}
<value>
is substituted if the attribute <name>
is
undefined otherwise an empty string is substituted. <value>
can contain simple attribute references.
{<name>#<value>}
<value>
is substituted if the attribute <name>
is defined
otherwise the undefined attribute entry causes the containing
line to be dropped. <value>
can contain simple attribute
references.
{<name>%<value>}
<value>
is substituted if the attribute <name>
is not
defined otherwise the containing line is dropped. <value>
can contain simple attribute references.
{<name>@<regexp>:<value1>[:<value2>]}
<value1>
is substituted if the value of attribute <name>
matches the regular expression <regexp>
otherwise <value2>
is substituted. If attribute <name>
is not defined the
containing line is dropped. If <value2>
is omitted an empty
string is assumed. The values and the regular expression can
contain simple attribute references. To embed colons in the
values or the regular expression escape them with backslashes.
{<name>$<regexp>:<value1>[:<value2>]}
Same behavior as the previous ternary attribute except for the following cases:
{<name>$<regexp>:<value>}
<value>
if <name>
matches <regexp>
otherwise the result is undefined and the containing
line is dropped.
{<name>$<regexp>::<value>}
<value>
if <name>
does not match
<regexp>
otherwise the result is undefined and the
containing line is dropped.
Conditional attributes are mainly used in AsciiDoc configuration
files — see the distribution .conf
files for examples.
If {backend}
is docbook
or xhtml11
the example evaluates to
“DocBook or XHTML backend” otherwise it evaluates to “some other
backend”:
{backend@docbook|xhtml11:DocBook or XHTML backend:some other backend}
This example maps the frame
attribute values [topbot
, all
,
none
, sides
] to [hsides
, border
, void
, vsides
]:
{frame@topbot:hsides}{frame@all:border}{frame@none:void}{frame@sides:vsides}
System attribute references generate the attribute text value by
executing a predefined action that is parametrized by a single
argument. The syntax is {<action>:<argument>}
.
{eval:<expression>}
<expression>
. If
<expression>
evaluates to None
or False
the reference is
deemed undefined and the line containing the reference is
dropped from the output. If the expression evaluates to
True
the attribute evaluates to an empty string. In all
remaining cases the attribute evaluates to a string
representation of the <expression>
result.
{include:<filename>}
Substitutes contents of the file named <filename>
.
{sys:<command>}
<command>
.
{sys2:<command>}
<command>
.
System reference behavior
Intrinsic attributes are simple attributes that are created
automatically from AsciiDoc document header parameters, asciidoc(1)
command-line arguments, execution parameters along with attributes
defined in the default configuration files. Here’s the list of
predefined intrinsic attributes:
{amp} ampersand (&) character {asciidoc-dir} the asciidoc(1) application directory {asciidoc-file} the full path name of the asciidoc(1) script {asciidoc-version} the version of asciidoc(1) {author} author's full name {authored} empty string '' if {author} or {email} defined, {authorinitials} author initials (from document header) {backend-<backend>} empty string '' {<backend>-<doctype>} empty string '' {backend} document backend specified by `-b` option {backslash} backslash character {basebackend-<base>} empty string '' {basebackend} html or docbook {brvbar} broken vertical bar (|) character {date} document date (from document header) {docdate} document last modified date {doctime} document last modified time {docname} document file name without extension {docfile} document file name (note 5) {docdir} document input directory name (note 5) {doctitle} document title (from document header) {doctype-<doctype>} empty string '' {doctype} document type specified by `-d` option {email} author's email address (from document header) {empty} empty string '' {encoding} specifies input and output encoding {filetype-<fileext>} empty string '' {filetype} output file name file extension {firstname} author first name (from document header) {gt} greater than (>) character {id} running block id generated by BlockId elements {indir} input file directory name (note 2,5) {infile} input file name (note 2,5) {lastname} author last name (from document header) {level} title level 1..4 (in section titles) {listindex} the list index (1..) of the most recent list item {localdate} the current date {localtime} the current time {lt} less than (<) character {manname} manpage name (defined in NAME section) {manpurpose} manpage (defined in NAME section) {mantitle} document title minus the manpage volume number {manvolnum} manpage volume number (1..8) (from document header) {middlename} author middle name (from document header) {nbsp} Non-breaking space entity {outdir} document output directory name (note 2) {outfile} output file name (note 2) {reftext} running block xreflabel generated by BlockId elements {revision} document revision number (from document header) {sectnum} formatted section number (in section titles) {showcomments} send comment lines to the output {title} section title (in titled elements) {two_colons} Two colon characters {two_semicolons} Two semicolon characters {user-dir} the ~/.asciidoc directory (if it exists) {verbose} defined as '' if --verbose command option specified
NOTES
{outfile}
, {outdir}
, {infile}
, {indir}
attributes are
effectively read-only (you can set them but it won’t affect the
input or output file paths).
ifdef
,
ifndef
and endif
System macros for conditional inclusion.
[5]
{docfile}
and {docdir}
refer to root document specified on
the asciidoc(1)
command-line; {infile}
and {indir}
refer to
the current input file which may be the root document or an
included file. While the input is being read from the standard
input (stdin
) these attributes are undefined.
The syntax and behavior of Paragraph, DelimitedBlock, List and Table block elements is determined by block definitions contained in AsciiDoc configuration file sections.
Each definition consists of a section title followed by one or more section entries. Each entry defines a block parameter controlling some aspect of the block’s behavior. Here’s an example:
[blockdef-listing] delimiter=^-{4,}$ template=listingblock presubs=specialcharacters,callouts
AsciiDoc Paragraph, DelimitedBlock, List and Table block elements share a common subset of configuration file parameters:
<option>-option
(where <option>
is the option name).
The following composite values are also allowed:
subsnormal
and subsverbatim
entries in a configuration file
[miscellaneous]
section.
Optional comma separated list of positional attribute names. This list maps positional attributes (in the block’s attribute list) to named block attributes. The following example, from the QuoteBlock definition, maps the first and section positional attributes:
posattrs=attribution,citetitle
The following block parameters behave like document attributes and can be set in block attribute lists and style definitions: template, options, subs, presubs, postsubs, filter.
A style is a set of block attributes bundled as a single named attribute. The following example defines a style named verbatim:
verbatim-style=template="literalblock",subs="verbatim"
-style
and the
style parameter value is in the form of a list of named attributes.
postsubs=("callouts",)
not postsubs="callouts"
.
Paragraph translation is controlled by [paradef*]
configuration file
section entries. Users can define new types of paragraphs and modify
the behavior of existing types by editing AsciiDoc configuration
files.
Here is the shipped Default paragraph definition:
[paradef-default] delimiter=(?P<text>\S.*) template=paragraph
The Default paragraph definition has a couple of special properties:
[paradef-default]
.
Paragraph specific block parameter notes:
Paragraph processing proceeds as follows:
DelimitedBlock options values are:
presubs, postsubs and filter entries are meaningless when sectionbody or skip options are set.
DelimitedBlock processing proceeds as follows:
![]() | |
Attribute expansion is performed on the block filter command before it is executed, this is useful for passing arguments to the filter. |
List behavior and syntax is determined by [listdef*]
configuration
file sections. The user can change existing list behavior and add new
list types by editing configuration files.
List specific block definition notes:
<name>
of the [listtags-<name>]
configuration file section
containing list markup tag definitions. The tag entries (list,
entry, label, term, text) map the AsciiDoc list structure to
backend markup; see the listtags sections in the AsciiDoc
distributed backend .conf
configuration files for examples.
Table behavior and syntax is determined by [tabledef*]
and
[tabletags*]
configuration file sections. The user can change
existing table behavior and add new table types by editing
configuration files. The following [tabledef*]
section entries
generate table output markup elements:
Table behavior is also influenced by the following [miscellaneous]
configuration file entries:
Table definition behavior
[tabledef-default]
and [tabletags-default]
) so you
only need to override those conf file entries that require
modification.
Filters are external shell commands used to process Paragraph and DelimitedBlock content; they are specified in configuration file Paragraph and DelimitedBlock definitions.
There’s nothing special about the filters, they’re just standard UNIX filters: they read text from the standard input, process it, and write to the standard output.
Attribute substitution is performed on the filter command prior to execution — attributes can be used to pass parameters from the AsciiDoc source document to the filter.
![]() | |
Filters can potentially generate unsafe output. Before installing a filter you should verify that it can’t be coerced into generating malicious output or exposing sensitive information. |
If the filter command does not specify a directory path then
asciidoc(1)
searches for the command:
$HOME/.asciidoc/filters
directory.
/etc/asciidoc/filters
directory is searched.
asciidoc(1)
./filters
directory.
$PATH
).
Sub-directories are also included in the searches — standard practice
is to install each filter in it’s own sub-directory with the same name
as the filter’s style definition. For example the music filter’s style
name is music so it’s configuration and filter files are stored in
the filters/music
directory.
Filters are normally accompanied by a configuration file containing a Paragraph or DelimitedBlock definition along with corresponding markup templates.
While it is possible to create new Paragraph or DelimitedBlock definitions the preferred way to implement a filter is to add a style to the existing Paragraph and ListingBlock definitions (all filters shipped with AsciiDoc use this technique). The filter is applied to the paragraph or delimited block by preceding it with an attribute list: the first positional attribute is the style name, remaining attributes are normally filter specific parameters.
asciidoc(1)
auto-loads all .conf
files found in the filter search
paths (see previous section).
AsciiDoc comes with a toy filter for highlighting source code keywords
and comments. See also the ./filters/code/code-filter-readme.txt
file.
![]() | |
This filter primarily to demonstrate how to write a filter — it’s much to simplistic to be passed off as a code syntax highlighter. If you want a full featured multi-language highlighter use the Source Code Highlighter Filter. |
.Code filter example [code,python] ---------------------------------------------- ''' A multi-line comment.''' def sub_word(mo): ''' Single line comment.''' word = mo.group('word') # Inline comment if word in keywords[language]: return quote + word + quote else: return word ----------------------------------------------
Outputs:
Example 10. Code filter example
''' A multi-line comment.''' def sub_word(mo): ''' Single line comment.''' word = mo.group('word') # Inline comment if word in keywords[language]: return quote + word + quote else: return word
A
source
code highlighter filter can be found in the AsciiDoc distribution
./filters
directory.
A music filter is
included in the distribution ./filters
directory. It translates
music in LilyPond or
ABC notation to standard Western classical
notation in the form of a trimmed PNG image which is automatically
inserted into the output document.
DocBook files are validated, parsed and translated by a combination of applications collectively called a DocBook tool chain. The function of a tool chain is to read the DocBook markup (produced by AsciiDoc) and transform it to a presentation format (for example HTML, PDF, HTML Help, DVI, PostScript, LaTeX).
A wide range of user output format requirements coupled with a choice of available tools and stylesheets results in many valid tool chain combinations.
One of the biggest hurdles for new users is installing, configuring
and using a DocBook XML toolchain. a2x(1)
can help — it’s a
toolchain wrapper command that will generate XHTML (chunked and
unchunked), PDF, DVI, PS, LaTeX, man page, HTML Help and text file
outputs from an AsciiDoc text file. a2x(1)
does all the grunt work
associated with generating and sequencing the toolchain commands and
managing intermediate and output files. a2x(1)
also optionally
deploys admonition and navigation icons and a CSS stylesheet. See the
a2x(1)
man page for more details. All you need is
xsltproc(1), DocBook XSL Stylesheets and optionally:
dblatex or FOP (if you want PDF); w3m(1)
or
lynx(1)
(if you want text).
The following examples generate doc/source-highlight-filter.pdf
from
the AsciiDoc doc/source-highlight-filter.txt
source file. The first
example uses dblatex(1)
(the default PDF generator) the second
example forces FOP to be used:
$ a2x -f pdf doc/source-highlight-filter.txt $ a2x -f pdf --fop doc/source-highlight-filter.txt
See the a2x(1)
man page for details.
![]() | |
Use the |
AsciiDoc produces nicely styled HTML directly without requiring a DocBook toolchain but there are also advantages in going the DocBook route:
On the other hand, HTML output directly from AsciiDoc is much faster, is easily customized and can be used in situations where there is no suitable DocBook toolchain (see the AsciiDoc website for example).
There are two commonly used tools to generate PDFs from DocBook, dblatex and FOP.
dblatex or FOP?
.hhp
and .html
) files to HTML Help
(.chm
) files using the Microsoft HTML Help Compiler.
.txt
) files to DocBook XML (.xml
) files.
latex(1)
.
.fo
)
files to PDF files. The XSL-FO files are generated from DocBook
source files using DocBook XSL Stylesheets and
xsltproc(1).
hhc.exe
) is a command-line tool
that converts HTML Help source files to a single HTML Help (.chm
)
file. It runs on MS Windows platforms and can be downloaded from
http://www.microsoft.com.
The AsciiDoc distribution ./dblatex
directory contains
asciidoc-dblatex.xsl
(customized XSL parameter settings) and
asciidoc-dblatex.sty
(customized LaTeX settings). These are examples
of optional dblatex output customization and are used by
a2x(1)
.
You will have noticed that the distributed HTML and HTML Help
documentation files (for example ./doc/asciidoc.html
) are not the
plain outputs produced using the default DocBook XSL Stylesheets
configuration. This is because they have been processed using
customized DocBook XSL Stylesheets along with (in the case of HTML
outputs) the custom ./stylesheets/docbook.css
CSS stylesheet.
You’ll find the customized DocBook XSL drivers along with additional
documentation in the distribution ./docbook-xsl
directory. The
examples that follow are executed from the distribution documentation
(./doc
) directory.
common.xsl
chunked.xsl
Generate chunked XHTML (separate HTML pages for each document
section) in the ./doc/chunked
directory. For example:
$ python ../asciidoc.py -b docbook asciidoc.txt $ xsltproc --nonet ../docbook-xsl/chunked.xsl asciidoc.xml
fo.xsl
Generate XSL Formatting Object (.fo
) files for subsequent PDF
file generation using FOP. For example:
$ python ../asciidoc.py -b docbook article.txt $ xsltproc --nonet ../docbook-xsl/fo.xsl article.xml > article.fo $ fop.sh article.fo article.pdf
htmlhelp.xsl
Generate Microsoft HTML Help source files for the MS HTML Help
Compiler in the ./doc/htmlhelp
directory. This example is run on
MS Windows from a Cygwin shell prompt:
$ python ../asciidoc.py -b docbook asciidoc.txt $ xsltproc --nonet ../docbook-xsl/htmlhelp.xsl asciidoc.xml $ c:/Program\ Files/HTML\ Help\ Workshop/hhc.exe htmlhelp.hhp
manpage.xsl
Generate a roff(1)
format UNIX man page from a DocBook XML
refentry document. This example generates an asciidoc.1
man
page file:
$ python ../asciidoc.py -d manpage -b docbook asciidoc.1.txt $ xsltproc --nonet ../docbook-xsl/manpage.xsl asciidoc.1.xml
xhtml.xsl
Convert a DocBook XML file to a single XHTML file. For example:
$ python ../asciidoc.py -b docbook asciidoc.txt $ xsltproc --nonet ../docbook-xsl/xhtml.xsl asciidoc.xml > asciidoc.html
If you want to see how the complete documentation set is processed
take a look at the A-A-P script ./doc/main.aap
.
AsciiDoc does not have a text backend (for most purposes AsciiDoc
source text is fine), however you can convert AsciiDoc text files to
formatted text using the AsciiDoc a2x(1)
toolchain wrapper
utility.
The default XML character set UTF-8
is used when AsciiDoc generates
DocBook files but this can be changed by setting the xmldecl
entry
in the [attributes]
section of the docbook.conf
file or by
composing your own configuration file [header]
section).
![]() | |
If you get an undefined entity error when processing DocBook
files you’ll may find that you’ve used an undefined HTML character
entity. An easy (although inelegant) fix is to use the character’s
character code instead of its symbolic name (for example use |
If your system has been configured with an XML catalog you may find a number of entity sets are already automatically included.
The Adobe PDF Specification states that the following 14 fonts should be available to every PDF reader: Helvetica (normal, bold, italic, bold italic), Times (normal, bold, italic, bold italic), Courier (normal, bold, italic, bold italic), Symbol and ZapfDingbats. Non-standard fonts should be embedded in the distributed document.
The asciidoc(1)
command has a --help
option which prints help topics
to stdout. The default topic summarizes asciidoc(1)
usage:
$ asciidoc --help
To print a list of help topics:
$ asciidoc --help=topics
To print a help topic specify the topic name as a command argument. Help topic names can be shortened so long as they are not ambiguous. Examples:
$ asciidoc --help=manpage $ asciidoc -hm # Short version of previous example. $ asciidoc --help=syntax $ asciidoc -hs # Short version of previous example.
To change, delete or add your own help topics edit a help
configuration file. The help file name help-<lang>.conf
is based on
the setting of the lang
attribute, it defaults to help.conf
(English). The help file location will depend on whether you
want the topics to apply to all users or just the current user.
The help topic files have the same named section format as other
configuration files. The help.conf
files are stored in the
same locations and loaded in the same order as other configuration
files.
When the --help
command-line option is specified AsciiDoc loads the
appropriate help files and then prints the contents of the section
whose name matches the help topic name. If a topic name is not
specified default
is used. You don’t need to specify the whole help
topic name on the command-line, just enough letters to ensure it’s not
ambiguous. If a matching help file section is not found a list of
available topics is printed.
Writing AsciiDoc documents will be a whole lot more pleasant if you know your favorite text editor. Learn how to indent and reformat text blocks, paragraphs, lists and sentences. Tips for vim users follow.
Use the vim :gq
command to reformat paragraphs. Setting the
textwidth sets the right text wrap margin; for example:
:set textwidth=70
To reformat a paragraph:
gq}
.
Execute :help gq
command to read about the vim gq command.
![]() | |
|
The gq
command can also be used to format bulleted, numbered and
callout lists. First you need to set the comments
, formatoptions
and formatlistpat
(see the Example ~/.vimrc
file).
Now you can format simple lists that use dash, asterisk, period and plus bullets along with numbered ordered lists:
gq}
.
Indent whole paragraphs by indenting the fist line with the desired
indent and then executing the gq}
command.
" Show tabs and trailing characters. set listchars=tab:»·,trail:· set list " Don't highlight searched text. highlight clear Search " Don't move to matched text while search pattern is being entered. set noincsearch " Reformat paragraphs and list. nnoremap R gq} " Delete trailing white space and Dos-returns and to expand tabs to spaces. nnoremap S :set et<CR>:retab!<CR>:%s/[\r \t]\+$//<CR> autocmd BufRead,BufNewFile *.txt,README,TODO,CHANGELOG,NOTES \ setlocal autoindent expandtab tabstop=8 softtabstop=2 shiftwidth=2 filetype=asciidoc \ textwidth=70 wrap formatoptions=tcqn \ formatlistpat=^\\s*\\d\\+\\.\\s\\+\\\\|^\\s*<\\d\\+>\\s\\+\\\\|^\\s*[a-zA-Z.]\\.\\s\\+\\\\|^\\s*[ivxIVX]\\+\\.\\s\\+ \ comments=s1:/*,ex:*/,://,b:#,:%,:XCOMM,fb:-,fb:*,fb:+,fb:.,fb:>
asciidoc(1)
-v
(--verbose
) command-line option displays the
order of configuration file loading and warns of potential
configuration file problems.
'UTF-8' codec can't decode ...
then you source file contains invalid UTF-8 characters — set the
AsciiDoc encoding attribute for the correct character set
(typically ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1) for European languages).
AsciiDoc attempts to validate the input AsciiDoc source but makes
no attempt to validate the output markup, it leaves that to
external tools such as xmllint(1)
(integrated into a2x(1)
).
Backend validation cannot be hardcoded into AsciiDoc because
backends are dynamically configured. The following example
generates valid HTML but invalid DocBook (the DocBook literal
element cannot contain an emphasis
element):
+monospaced text with an _emphasized_ word+
You can suppress markup expansion by placing a backslash character immediately in front of the element. The following example suppresses inline monospaced formatting:
\+1 for C++.
Overlapping text formatting will generate illegal overlapping markup tags which will result in downstream XML parsing errors. Here’s an example:
Some *strong markup _that overlaps* emphasized markup_.
Lines beginning with numbers at the end of sentences will be interpreted as ordered list items. The following example (incorrectly) begins a new list with item number 1999:
He was last sighted in 1999. Since then things have moved on.
The list item out of sequence warning makes it unlikely that this problem will go unnoticed.
Special character substitution precedes attribute substitution so if attribute values contain special characters you may, depending on the substitution context, need to escape the special characters yourself. For example:
$ asciidoc -a 'corpname=Bill & Ben Inc.' mydoc.txt
If named attribute list entries are present then all string attribute values must be quoted. For example:
["Desktop screenshot",width=32]
You have a number of stand-alone AsciiDoc documents that you want to
process as a single document. Simply processing them with a series of
include
macros won’t work because the documents contain (level 0)
document titles. The solution is to create a top level wrapper
document that redefines the document underlines, pushing them down one
level. For example combined.txt
:
:titles.underlines: "__","==","--","~~","^^" Combined Document Title _______________________ include::document1.txt[] include::document2.txt[] include::document3.txt[]
The document titles in the included documents will now be processed as level 1 section titles.
include
macro lines to ensure the
title of the included document is not seen as part of the last
paragraph of the previous document.
You have divided your AsciiDoc document into separate files (one per top level section) which are combined and processed with the following top level document:
Combined Document Title ======================= Joe Bloggs v1.0, 12-Aug-03 include::section1.txt[] include::section2.txt[] include::section3.txt[]
You also want to process the section files as separate documents.
This is easy because asciidoc(1)
will quite happily process
section1.txt
, section2.txt
and section3.txt
separately — the
resulting output documents contain the section but have no document
title.
Use the -s
(--no-header-footer
) command-line option to suppress
header and footer output, this is useful if the processed output is to
be included in another file. For example:
$ asciidoc -s -b docbook section1.txt
asciidoc(1)
can be used as a filter, so you can pipe chunks of text
through it. For example:
$ echo 'Hello *World!*' | asciidoc -s - <div class="paragraph"><p>Hello <strong>World!</strong></p></div>
See the [footer]
section in the AsciiDoc distribution xhtml11.conf
configuration file.
If the indentation and layout of the asciidoc(1)
output is not to your
liking you can:
{empty}
glossary entry is useful for
outputting trailing blank lines in markup templates.
Use Dave Raggett’s HTML Tidy program
to tidy asciidoc(1)
output. Example:
$ asciidoc -b docbook -o - mydoc.txt | tidy -indent -xml >mydoc.xml
Use the xmllint(1)
format option. Example:
$ xmllint --format mydoc.xml
The conditional inclusion of DocBook SGML markup at the end of the
distribution docbook.conf
file illustrates how to support minor DTD
variations. The included sections override corresponding entries from
preceding sections.
Reproducing presentation documents from someone else’s source has one major problem: unless your configuration files are the same as the creator’s you won’t get the same output.
The solution is to create a single backend specific configuration file
using the asciidoc(1)
-c
(--dump-conf
) command-line option. You
then ship this file along with the AsciiDoc source document plus the
asciidoc.py
script. The only end user requirement is that they have
Python installed (and of course that they consider you a trusted
source). This example creates a composite HTML configuration
file for mydoc.txt
:
$ asciidoc -cb xhtml11 mydoc.txt > mydoc-xhtml11.conf
Ship mydoc.txt
, mydoc-html.conf
, and asciidoc.py
. With
these three files (and a Python interpreter) the recipient can
regenerate the HMTL output:
$ ./asciidoc.py -eb xhtml11 mydoc.txt
The -e
(--no-conf
) option excludes the use of implicit
configuration files, ensuring that only entries from the
mydoc-html.conf
configuration are used.
Adjust your style sheets to add the correct separation between block
elements. Inserting blank paragraphs containing a single non-breaking
space character {nbsp}
works but is an ad hoc solution compared
to using style sheets.
You can close off section tags up to level N
by calling the
eval::[Section.setlevel(N)]
system macro. This is useful if you
want to include a section composed of raw markup. The following
example includes a DocBook glossary division at the top section level
(level 0):
ifdef::backend-docbook[] eval::[Section.setlevel(0)] +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ <glossary> <title>Glossary</title> <glossdiv> ... </glossdiv> </glossary> +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ endif::backend-docbook[]
Use xmllint(1)
to check the AsciiDoc generated markup is both well
formed and valid. Here are some examples:
$ xmllint --nonet --noout --valid docbook-file.xml $ xmllint --nonet --noout --valid xhtml11-file.html $ xmllint --nonet --noout --valid --html html4-file.html
The --valid
option checks the file is valid against the document
type’s DTD, if the DTD is not installed in your system’s catalog then
it will be fetched from its Internet location. If you omit the
--valid
option the document will only be checked that it is well
formed.
An AsciiDoc block element is a document entity composed of one or more whole lines of text.
AsciiDoc inline elements occur within block element textual content, they perform formatting and substitution tasks.
An AsciiDoc block element that has a BlockTitle. Formal elements are normally listed in front or back matter, for example lists of tables, examples and figures.
The word verbatim indicates that white space and line breaks in the source document are to be preserved in the output document.
a2x(1)
--no-icons
and --no-copy
options with their
negated equivalents: --icons
and --copy
respectively. The
default behavior has also changed — the use of icons and copying of
icon and CSS files must be specified explicitly with the --icons
and --copy
options.
The rationale for the changes can be found in the AsciiDoc
CHANGELOG
.
![]() | |
If you want to disable unconstrained quotes, the new alternative
constrained quotes syntax and the new index entry syntax then you can
define the attribute |
Read the README
and INSTALL
files (in the distribution root
directory) for install prerequisites and procedures. The distribution
Makefile.in
(used by configure
to generate the Makefile
) is the
canonical installation procedure.
AsciiDoc safe mode skips potentially dangerous sections in AsciiDoc source files by inhibiting the execution of arbitrary code or the inclusion of arbitrary files.
The safe mode is enabled by default and can only be disabled using the
asciidoc(1)
--unsafe
command-line option.
Safe mode constraints
eval
, sys
and sys2
executable attributes and block macros are
not executed.
include::<filename>[]
and include1::<filename>[]
block macro
files must reside inside the parent file’s directory.
{include:<filename>}
executable attribute files must reside
inside the source document directory.
![]() | |
The safe mode is not designed to protect against unsafe AsciiDoc configuration files. Be especially careful when:
|
AsciiDoc can process UTF-8 character sets but there are some things you need to be aware of:
If you are generating output documents using a DocBook toolchain
then you should set the AsciiDoc lang
attribute to the appropriate
language (it defaults to en
(English)). This will ensure things
like table of contents, revision history, figure and table captions
and admonition captions are output in the specified language.
For example:
$ a2x -a lang=es doc/article.txt
asciidoc(1)
you’ll
need to set the various *_caption
attributes to match your target
language (see the list of captions and titles in the [attributes]
section of the default asciidoc.conf
file). The easiest way is to
create a language .conf
file (see the example lang-es.conf
file
that comes with the AsciiDoc distribution).
asciidoc(1)
automatically loads configuration files named like
lang-<lang>.conf
where <lang>
is a two letter language code that
matches the current AsciiDoc lang
attribute. See also
Configuration File Names and Locations.
The AsciiDoc ./vim/
distribution directory contains Vim syntax
highlighter and filetype detection scripts for AsciiDoc. Syntax
highlighting makes it much easier to spot AsciiDoc syntax errors.
If Vim is installed on your system the AsciiDoc installer
(install.sh
) will automatically install the vim scripts in the Vim
global configuration directory (/etc/vim
).
You can also turn on syntax highlighting by adding the following line to the end of you AsciiDoc source files:
// vim: set syntax=asciidoc:
![]() | |
Dag Wieers has implemented an alternative Vim syntax file for AsciiDoc which can be found here http://svn.rpmforge.net/svn/trunk/tools/asciidoc-vim/. |
![]() | |
Emacs users: The *Nix Power Tools project has released an AsciiDoc syntax highlighter for emacs. |
The current implementation does a reasonable job but on occasions gets things wrong. This list of limitations also discusses how to work around the problems:
+
) in the preceding blank line.
Lines within a paragraph beginning with a period will be highlighted as block titles. For example:
.chm file.
To work around this restriction move the last word of the previous line to the start of the current (although words starting with a period should probably be quoted monospace which would also get around the problem).
![]() | |
Sometimes incorrect highlighting is caused by preceding lines that appear blank but contain white space characters — setting your editor options so that white space characters are visible is a good idea. |
Here is the list of predefined attribute list options:
Option | Backends | AsciiDoc Elements | Description |
---|---|---|---|
compact | docbook, xhtml11 | bulleted list, numbered list | Minimizes vertical space in the list |
strong | xhtml11,html4 | labeled lists | Emboldens label text. |
footer | docbook, xhtml11, html4 | table | The last row of the table is rendered as a footer. |
header | docbook, xhtml11, html4 | table | The first row of the table is rendered as a header. |
autowidth | xhtml11,html4 | table | The column widths are determined by the browser, not the AsciiDoc cols attribute. If there is no width attribute the table width is also left up to the browser. |
breakable, unbreakable | docbook (XSL/FO) | table | The breakable options allows the table to break across page boundaries (the default behavior); unbreakable attempts to keep the table together on a single page. If neither option is specified the default XSL stylesheet behavior prevails. |
pgwide | docbook (XSL/FO) | table, block image, horizontal labeled list | Specifies that the element should be rendered across the full text width of the page irrespective of the current indentation. |
The asciidoc(1)
--verbose
command-line option prints additional
information to stderr: files processed, filters processed, warnings,
system attribute evaluation.
A special attribute named trace controls the output of diagnostic information. If the trace attribute is defined then element-by-element diagnostic messages detailing output markup generation are printed to stderr. The trace attribute can be set on the command-line or from within the document using Attribute Entries (the latter allows tracing to be confined to specific portions of the document).
In the case of inline substitutions:
<<<
and >>>
delimiters.
Command-line examples:
Trace the entire document.
$ asciidoc -a trace mydoc.txt
Trace messages whose names start with quotes
or macros
:
$ asciidoc -a 'trace=quotes|macros' mydoc.txt
Print the first line of all trace messages:
$ asciidoc -a trace mydoc.txt 2>&1 | grep ^TRACE:
Attribute Entry examples:
Begin printing all trace messages:
:trace:
Print only matched trace messages:
:trace: quotes|macros
Turn trace messages off:
:trace!:
[1] This is a rough structural guide, not a rigorous syntax definition
[2] An example footnote.
[3] Second footnote
[4] The existence of a {revisionhistory}
attribute causes a
revision history file (if it exists) to be included in DocBook
outputs. If a file named like {docname}-revhistory.xml
exists in
the document’s directory then it will be added verbatim to the DocBook
header (see the ./doc/asciidoc-revhistory.xml
example that comes
with the AsciiDoc distribution).
[5] Conditional inclusion using ifdef
and ifndef
macros
differs from attribute conditional inclusion in that the former
occurs when the file is read while the latter occurs when the
contents are written.