AsciiDoc ChangeLog

• LaTeXMathML capability has been added for users who are more familiar with or prefer LaTeX math formulas to the ASCIIMathML notation (thanks to Arthur Sakellariou for the patch).

• The source highlight and code filters now process embedded callouts.

• Added an —attribute=ATTRIBUTE option to a2x(1) for passing attribute values to asciidoc(1) (a shortcut for —asciidoc-opts="-a ATTRIBUTE").

• Image block and inline macros prepend optional {imagesdir} attribute to image link targets.

• Fixed an assertion error that occurred when a configuration file containing an include::[] macro was loaded using the --conf-file option and the configuration file name did not include an explicit directory path — patch submitted by Dmitry Potapov.

• Asciidoc titles are only converted to lower case if all characters are upper case otherwise case is left unchanged — patch submitted by Dmitry Potapov.

• Added a missing check that input is not stdin before loading configuration files from the document directory — patch submitted by Dmitry Potapov.

• Attribute list items must evaluate to strings, numbers or None (previously it was possible to evaluate to other object types which resulted in surprising attribute values).

• If an AsciiDoc document has no title an empty XHTML 1.1 title element is created — previously the title element was dropped which resulted in invalid XHTML 1.1.

• The Vim syntax file no longer highlights escaped callouts.

• The Vim syntax highlighter now correctly highlights Double-dollar passthroughs when they enclose dollar delimited ASCIIMathML and LaTeXMathML formulas.

• A number of improvements have been made to the Vim syntax highlighter, for example the word C++ is no longer mistaken for the start of an unconstrained monospace quote.

• Labeled list definitions have been tightened — a list label can no longer containing trailing spaces. The following example is no longer recognized as a valid list label:

  Lorum ipsum ::

  This change implements the originally intended behavior (as per the AsciiDoc documentation and examples) so there should be very few compatibility issues.

• A Vim syntax file is now included in the AsciiDoc distribution (inspired by Felix Obenhuber's asciidoc.vim script). You can find it (along with a Vim filetype detection script in the distribution ./vim/ directory (the scripts are installed automatically by the AsciiDoc installer ./install.sh). See Appendix J of the AsciiDoc User Guide for details.

• Added toclevel attribute (1..4) which sets the number of title levels reported in the table of contents. Defaults to 2 and must be used with the toc attribute. Example usage:

  $ asciidoc -a toc -a toclevels=3 doc/asciidoc.txt

• Added a listindex attribute which is the current list item index (1..). If this attribute appears outside a list its value is the number of items in the most recently closed list.

• The single line titles syntax now accepts trailing suffixes — this syntax matches the title line syntax of a number of popular Wiki markups.

• If a QuoteBlock has no attribution or citetitle then the DocBook <attribution> element is not generated (previously generated empty <attribution> element).

• If the text of a labeled list item is blank then no texttag is written.

• An end of line backslash performs line continuation for horizontal labeled list items.

• The Revision line now accommodates Subversion $Id markers (in addition to CVS and RCS markers). Thanks to Tiago Sturmer Daitx for this patch.

• Implemented a2x(1) option —skip-asciidoc which allows a2x(1) to convert DocBook XML files not derived from AsciiDoc sources.

• If a2x(1) —doctype option is not specified it defaults to manpage if —format=manpage else defaults to article (previously —doctype always defaulted to article).

• Added an External Resources section to the AsciiDoc home page.

• AsciiDoc generated XHTML documents now display a table of contents if the toc attribute is defined (JavaScript needs to be enabled for this to work). Thanks to Troy Hanson who contributed this feature based on a JavaScript by Mihai Bazon. I've simplified things somewhat to match Docbook XSL Stylesheets style, see Troy's tpl User Guide for a fancier layout. Use the -a toc -a numbered command-line options to produce a number table of contents.

• A music filter is included in the distribution ./filters/ directory. It translates music in LilyPond or ABC notation to standard classical notation in the form of a trimmed PNG image which is inserted into the AsciiDoc output document.

• Incorporated Paul Melis's Win32 filter patch. This workaround allows AsciiDoc to run filters under Windows.

• Added uninstall.sh script.

• Rather than proliferate a confusing number of filter block delimiters the following convention has been adopted: delimiters belonging to DelimitedBlock filters distributed with AsciiDoc will consist of a word (normally a noun identifying the block content) followed by four or more tilde characters. This has necessitated changing existing filter delimiters (the old delimiters still work but may be deprecated in future versions):

  • The example code filter block delimiter is now the word code followed by four or more tilde characters.

  • The source highlight filter block delimiter is now the word source followed by four or more tilde characters.

• Conditionally redefined subscript and superscripting so they use the old replacements mechanism when asciidoc7compatible is defined rather than the asciidoc 8 default unconstrained quoting (patch for affected files attached).

• Moved the source highlight filter from ./examples/ to ./filter/.

• Added {verbose} intrinsic attribute (useful for passing verbose flag to filters).

• Added {outdir} intrinsic attribute.

• Renamed {docdir} intrinsic attribute to unambiguous`{indir} ({docdir}` still works but may be removed in future release).

• If asciidoc(1) outputs to stdout then intrinsic attribute {docname} is extracted from the input file name.

• Quoting can can occur within words (based on patch submitted by Benjamin Klum). See the Unconstrained Quotes sub-section in the User Guide.

• The underline and plus characters can be used as alternatives to the existing apostrophe and backtick quote characters. They are arguably better choices than the apostrophe and backtick as they are not confused with punctuation.

• The syntax for index entry macros have have been deprecated from +…+ and +…+ to ((…)) and (((…))) respectively. Rationale:

  • Bracketing is consistent other with [[…]] and <<…>> reference macros.

  • To easily confused with triple plus passthroughs.

  • To make way for the new monospace quoting.

• Superscripts and subscripts are implemented as constrained quotes so they can now be escaped with a leading backslash and prefixed with with an attribute list.

• An experimental LaTeX backend has been written by Benjamin Klum (a number additions in this release are to accommodate the LaTeX backend).

• include macro file names now expand environment variables and tilde expansions.

• A configuration file [quotes] entry can be undefined by setting to a blank value.

• Added callto inline macro for Skype callto links.

• Added colnumber attribute for table data markup.

• A leading comment block or comment lines are now skipped (previously a document had to start with either attribute entries or a document Title).

• Experimental rows attribute (number of source lines in table) available in table markup templates (used by experimental LaTeX backend).

• Included install shell script written by Jacob Mandelson for installing the tarball distribution.

• Added INSTALL documentation file.

• Added replacements2 substitution options — a second replacements section.

• Added the ability to redefine normal and verbatim substitutions with subsnormal and subsverbatim entries in configuration file [miscellaneous] section.

• By default AttributeEntry values are substituted for specialcharacters and attributes, if you want a different AttributeEntry substitution set the attributeentry-subs attribute.

• The name in name=value configuration file entries can now end with a backslash, just escape the trailing backslash with a backslash. For example:

  abc\\=xyz

  Results in name=abc\ and value=xyz — previously this would have escaped the = character.

• A blank configuration file section deletes any preceding section with the same name (applies to non-markup template sections).

• A command-line attribute value with a @ suffix does not override existing document and configuration file attributes (normally command-line attributes have precedence over document and configuration file attributes).

• localtime attribute is now encoded from the native system encoding to the output encoding. Patch submitted by FKtPp — here's his description of the problem:

  “I am a Chinese user of AsciiDoc and I find that when I use UTF-8 (the default encoding) to write asciidoc documents in Windows platform the resulting html footer line will get screwed. It was caused by a localized tzname that was always encoded in the windows native encoding, which in my case is cp936.”

• a2x(1) can generate Open Document Text files using docbook2odf. Currently docbook2odf(1) only processes a subset of DocBook, unimplemented elements are skipped.

• The a2x(1) format option defaults to xhtml (previously a format had to be specified explicitly).

• The -d, --doctype=DOCTYPE option has been added to a2x(1) which is a shortcut for --asciidoc-options="--doctype=DOCTYPE".

• Replaced a2x(1) --no-icons and --no-copy options with their negated equivalents: --icons and --copy respectively. The default behavior has also changed: copying and use of icons is disabled by default. Rationale:

  • To make the default behavior more consistent since use of icons and CSS stylesheets does not apply to all formats.

  • To make the default behavior less surprising (the creation of icon and stylesheet output files must now be explicit).

• a2x(1) has been bumped from version 0.1.1 to version 1.0.0.

• Removed duplicate ./doc/a2x.1.txt from distribution tarball.

• Documentation errata.

• Attribute replacement is no longer performed twice in Titles and AttributeEntrys.

• a2x(1) skipped asciidoc(1) execution when rerun with different --asciidoc-options options, it now always executes asciidoc(1). The problem was that previously asciidoc(1) was executed only if the output file was missing or older than the source file.

• Support for ASCIIMathML has been added. See Appendix I: ASCIIMathML Support in the User Guide and the examples at http://www.methods.co.nz/asciidoc/asciimath.html.

• You can now prefix quoted text with inline attributes lists. You can use this to set font size and color (XHTML and HTML outputs).

• Added #…# quoting — it does nothing — it's purpose is to allow inline attributes to be applied to normal text.

• An inline passthrough mechanism has been implemented.

• Configuration file comment lines can be escaped with a backslash — this is to allows the inclusion of configuration lines that start with a hash character.

• The scriptsdir attribute can be used to specify the name of the directory containing linked JavaScripts (see the User Guide for details.

• The BackendBlock has been renamed PassthroughBlock for consistency with the new inline passthrough naming.

• a2x(1) now works with the older bash(1) version 2.05b. Patch submitted by Francis Daly.

• Content included by the include1::[] system macro is no longer subject to attribute substitution so that ambiguities no longer arise when used to include CSS or JavaScript files.

• The caption attribute can be used to customize admonition captions as well as image, table and example block element title prefixes (xhtml11 and html4 backends).

• You can now override the default icon image using the icon attribute to specify the path of the linked image (xhtml11 and html4 backends only).

• The deprecated imagesdir attribute is no longer recognized (use iconsdir instead).

• Added Appendix H: Using AsciiDoc with non-English Languages to the AsciiDoc User Guide.

• Added Admonition Icons and Captions subsection to the User Guide explaining how to customize Admonition elements.

• a2x(1) failed when configuration files were installed in the global /etc/asciidoc/ directory — it was only searching the directory containing the asciidoc executable (thanks to Christian Wiese for finding and submitting a patch this bug).

• The html4 backend admonition caption now correctly displays the admonition caption attribute (previously displayed the style attribute).

• a2x(1) toolchain wrapper utility. This overcomes the biggest hurdle for new users which seems to be assembling and using a working DocBook XML toolchain. With a2x(1) you can generate XHTML (chunked and unchunked), PDF, man page, HTML Help and text file outputs from an AsciiDoc input file with a single command. All you need to install (in addition to AsciiDoc) is xsltproc(1), DocBook XSL Stylesheets and optionally FOP (if you want PDF) or lynx(1) (if you want text).

• Block titles can now start with any non-space character (previously where not allowed to start with .~-_ characters).

• ./stylesheets/docbook.css renamed to ./stylesheets/docbook-xsl.css to clarify its function.

• Renamed ./docbook-xsl/manpages.xsl to ./docbook-xsl/manpage.xsl for consistency.

• Admonition and navigation icons moved to ./images/icons/ to clarify usage and conform with a2x(1) usage.

• Renamed xhtml11 intrinsic attribute imagesdir to iconsdir to keep vocab consistent and changed default value to ./images/icons (previously ./images). imagesdir attribute still accepted but deprecated.

• Unused image files have been weeded out of the distribution.

• Packager notes (appendix B) have been updated to reflect the needs of a2x(1).

The renaming of the xhtml11 backend imagesdir intrinsic attribute and it's new default value introduces a backward compatibility issue: if you use the icons attribute you will need to either move your icons to the new default ./images/icons location or include an —attribute iconsdir="your_icons_path" option in your asciidoc commands.

• Backslash line continuation is now observed in verbatim paragraphs.

• Fixed errors generated by example ./examples/website/build-website.sh script.

• Added ternary conditional attributes {<name>@<regexp>:<value1>[:<value2>]} and {<name>$<regexp>:<value1>[:<value2>]}.

• Safety violations now generate errors (they previously generated warnings).

• asciidoc(1) now defaults to safe mode, consequently the [miscellaneous] safe mode entry and —safe command-line option are no longer necessary (though for backward compatibility asciidoc(1) still accepts the —safe option).

• Backend Blocks are now flagged unsafe (they could be used to include arbitrary and hence potentially unsafe output content).

• Filters are no longer considered unsafe. There's not much point in insisting on filter safety since the installation of an unsafe filter would require the introduction of new or modified configuration files — if your application configurations can be compromised you're in all sorts of trouble (safe mode protects against unsafe input files not unsafe configuration). As with all filters, before installing, you should verify that they can't be coerced into generating malicious output or exposing sensitive information.

• Fixed a lot of glaring grammatical and factual errors in the User Guide.

• Added —safe and —unsafe command-line options — AsciiDoc can now be executed in a safe mode which disallows the execution of arbitrary code or the inclusion of arbitrary files (see Appendix C in the AsciiDoc User Guide).

• Included source-highlight filter in the distribution ./examples/source-highlight-filter/ directory (based on filter submitted by Ryan Phillips).

• Included the DocBook XSL Stylesheets 1.69.1 customizations used to generate the distributed AsciiDoc documentation (read the asciidoc-docbook-xsl.txt file in the distribution ./docbook-xsl/ directory).

• AsciiDoc DocBook XSL Stylesheet drivers moved from ./doc/ to ./docbook-xsl/.

• Modified ./doc/manpages.xsl so only URL content is displayed in manpages.

• Explicitly set table CSS border style (xhtml11 backend) to solid because default border styles vary from browser to browser.

• There are now long versions of all AsciiDoc options.

• If the —backend is not specified it defaults to xhtml11.

• Added CSS simulated frames layout to the examples website (see ./examples/website/layout2/README-website.txt). This layout does not work with IE6 and the original tables based layout is still the default.

• Support page added to AsciiDoc website.

• Invalid options are now trapped gracefully.

• Documentation errata.

• Reverted to use of strong, em, tt XHTML tags — they're more obvious and no less correct than span tags, besides, the generated file sizes are smaller (the User Guide was 11% smaller).

• Table title rendered with caption tag rather than a separate div.

• The AsciiDoc stylesdir attribute (if specified) is now recognized when searching for embedded stylesheets (previously only searched default ./stylesheets directory).

• Default charset encoding changed from ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8 — it's less language specific and displays most common languages.

• template::[] macros now expand in all configuration file sections previously only in markup template sections.

• Cleaned up example website layout CSS and configuration (presentation has not been changed).

• Refactored xhtml11.conf configuration file.

• Set consistent and sensible permissions on distributed files.

• White space is now stripped from DSV formatted table cell data.

• class="tableblock" attribute added to tables generated by xhtml-deprecated-css.conf to assist CSS.

• Illegal character set encoder (specified by the AsciiDoc encoding attribute) and character data are trapped gracefully.

• AsciiDoc table format attribute in table attribute lists were not recognized.

• The nested horizontal labeled list example in the AsciiDoc User Guide has been dropped — it generated invalid DocBook markup.

• A new xhtml11 backend generates XHTML 1.1 with integrated CSS2 replacing the previous xhtml, css, and css-embedded backends.

• The CSS stylesheets have finally been rewritten.

• The asciidoc(1) command help now includes user customizable help topics. When asciidoc is invoked with the --help option the command argument is interpreted as a help topic.

• The previous example website has been replaced by the actual AsciiDoc website (see ./examples/website/.

• XHTML generation options now controlled by the following attributes: badges, linkcss, icons, numbered, quirks, theme, stylesdir, imagesdir (see the User Guide for details.

• By default HTML and XHTML are output as stand-alone documents (no embedded CSS and no linked admonition icon images).

• Documents encoded with the UTF-8 Unicode character set are now processed thanks to a patch supplied by Viktor Vasilev.

• The -a ^name command-line syntax to undefine an attribute has been deprecated in favor of the -a name! syntax.

• AttributeEntry syntax addition: :name!: to undefine name attribute.

• Added template system block macro to allow the inclusion of one configuration file template section within another.

• A verse style attribute can now be applied to literal paragraphs and blocks to reproduce line breaks and white space from the source document.

• Replacements and Special Words can now be escaped with leading backslashes.

• Replacements are now processed in configuration file order (previous ordering was indeterminate).

• System macros can now be used in the base asciidoc.conf configuration file.

• Deprecated features that emitted warnings in prior versions are no longer tolerated.

• The eval system attribute expression evaluates to False the attribute is undefined, if it evaluates to True the result is an empty string.

• The Paragraph and DelimitedBlock presubs parameter can be aliased as subs.

• Added verbatim substitutions option.

• Renamed List Continuation Block to List Block and renamed the listcontinuation option to list.

• Deprecated default substitutions option (use normal instead).

• The section-numbers section numbering attribute has be renamed numbered.

• Dropped the #UNDER CONSTRUCTION# block macro.

• Rewrote Paragraph and DelimitedBlock handlers adding a styles configuration entry.

• Included files are no longer read inside conditionally excluded content.

• Manpage command names containing dashes (in the manpage NAME section) were misinterpreted as the spaced dash command name/purpose separator. Bug report and patch supplied by David Greaves.

• Unexpected error following malformed author line error.

• Special characters are now substituted in AttributeEntry element values.

• Spaced and unspaced em dashes are now recognized (previously only spaced em dashes were recognized).

• Replaced the table noborders option with richer frame and grid attributes.

• The duplicate macro warning message now only occurs when the verbose (-v) option is enabled.

• Single lines starting with two forward slashes hard up against the left margin are treated as comments and are not processed.

• Renamed section delimited block option to sectionbody to more accurately reflect it's role.

• Added a List Continuation block — a specialized delimited block that is functionally equivalent to the List Item Continuation feature except that the list contained within the block does not require explicit + list item continuation lines.

• Dropped deprecated <u> tags from generated HTML.

• Literal Block delimiters must now consist of at least four points (previously three) to avoid lone ellipsis ambiguity.

• Some system attribute evaluation failures caused unexpected exceptions to occur.

• Three new system block macros have been added — eval, sys and sys2 which are the block macro equivalents to the same named system attributes.

• Intrinsic macros have been renamed system macros along with action attributes which have been renamed system attributes:

  • To reflect their common (though contextually different) behavior.

  • To avoid confusion with intrinsic attributes.

• Asciidoc now searches in /etc/asciidoc/filters for filters.

• A global configuration file location /etc/asciidoc has been added and is now processed before all other locations (patch supplied by Fredrik Steen).

• Recoded tempfile.mktemp() and other artifacts that are no longer necessary or desirable (patches supplied by Fredrik Steen).

• Added BUGS file to the distribution.

• Illegal comment syntax in css-embedded-stylesheet.conf resulted in illegal CSS in files generated by the css-embedded backend.

A lot of new stuff. A new major version number — some regression incompatibility (hopefully mitigated by deprecated warnings).

Went mad trying to rein in the current feature anarchy — established a unified notion of document attributes. Attempted to introduce a consistent vocabulary — renamed many poorly or inconsistently named entities.

Actually, deprecated syntax is still processed correctly in almost all cases. One source of incompatibility that may arise if you have customized CSS stylesheets is the change of AsciiDoc CSS class names (see below). I guess the moral is if you've done a lot of configuration file customization and are happy with version 5 then you may want to stay put.

This version requires Python 2.3 or better to run.

• Glossary entries have been renamed attributes. This eliminates confusion with the accepted meaning of glossary.

• An AttributeEntry block element has been added so that document attributes can be assigned from within an AsciiDoc document.

• The AttributeList block element has been added which is a more general solution than the (now deprecated) DelimitedBlock arguments.

• An BlockId element has been added for setting block element anchor (link target) IDs.

• Quoted text can now span multiple lines (thanks to James Bowlin for this patch).

• Inline macros can now span multiple lines.

• ``double backtick / apostrophe'' quotes generate “curly quotes”.

• A warning is now emitted for out of order list item (applies to explicitly enumerated numbered list items).

• Added include action attribute.

• A line of three or more apostrophes generates an HTML horizontal ruler (<hr/> tag). You will get a warning if processed with non-HTML backend.

• An {imagesdir} attribute specifies image file location for images referenced in configuration files when generating HTML (the default location is images).

• An {stylesdir} attribute specifies the location of CSS stylesheets when generating styled HTML (the default location for configured markup is .).

• list entry has been deprecated, use {0} instead.

• New ExampleBlock delimited block along with associated variants Note, Tip, Warning, Caution and Important.

• The docbook.conf file now facilitates the optional inclusion of a DocBook revision history file.

• To better reflect their purpose the following block elements have been renamed: VerbatimBlock to ListingBlock; IndentedBlock to LiteralBlock; IndentedParagraph to LiteralParagraph; CustomBlock to BackendBlock; SimpleSection to SectionBody. Any corresponding CSS class names have also been changed which could result in backward incompatibility in customized stylesheets.

• Swapped plain DocBook admonition icons for Jimmac's DocBook icons (http://jimmac.musichall.cz/ikony.php3). The original plain icons have been moved to ./images/plain.

• Renamed html backend to xhtml to better reflect it's function (former html-4 backend renamed to html).

• A new inline anchor macro syntax [[[<id>]]] is available, it displays [<id>] at the anchor location and is for anchoring bibliography list entries.

• An optional single-line titles syntax can be used.

• Tweaks to distributed CSS stylesheets and FOP fo.xsl customization file.

• List Item Continuation has been implemented which allows additional block elements to be included in list items by separating them from the preceding list item element with a line containing a single plus character.

• A new Horizontal Labeled List list type has been added. Generates two column list — the first column contains the list element labels, the second contains the element text. Same syntax as Vertical Labeled Lists except the double colon label suffix is followed by the start of the list item text.

• Fixed broken backslash line continuation.

• Labeled list end tags were not undergoing attribute substitution.

• Documents without any author information now generate legitimate DocBook (previously if the author line was not included in the document header then an empty (illegal) DocBook author element was generated).

• Multiple spaces in filter command arguments were replaced by a single space. The ./examples/asciidoc2text/asciidoc2text.sh script now indents text correctly.

15-December-2004: Interim update: Updated asciidoc.py to fix broken join_lines function — no other changes.

• PDF documentation is now produced from DocBook XML using XSLTLib and FOP. Previously we processed DocBook SGML with jw(1) (which used Dvips to convert DVI files to PDF). FOP has come a long way in the last 12 months and produces very acceptable PDF under both Linux and Windows.

• Sections detailing how to install and use the DocBook XSL Stylesheets, xsltproc, FOP toolchain and the AsciiDoc XSLT drivers have been added to the User Guide.

• The PDF output from the he example article template has been included in the distribution (./doc/article.pdf).

• Special characters are emitted using decimal Unicode character codes (previously used named character entities which cannot be assumed included in non-HTML documents).

• Added registered trademark ® to [replacements].

• CSS stylesheet tweaks.

• Admonitions (Note, Tip, Important, Warning, Caution) include icons when generating css output.

• Callouts have been implemented (see the Callouts section of the AsciiDoc User Guide for details).

• Added XSL drivers for generating XHTML, chunked XHTML and HTML Help from DocBook XML using XSL stylesheets and xsltproc(1).

• Added CSS stylesheet for HTML generated from DocBook XML using XSL stylesheets.

• Distribution contains HTML Help formatted User Guide (./doc/asciidoc.chm), the User Guide tells you how it's generated.

• Images referred to by distributed stylesheets are now located in the ./images subdirectory (previously located in .).

• Filters path names are now handled properly under Cygwin.

• The usual documentation and examples additions, updates and polishing.

• The convention of using a .asc file extension for AsciiDoc files has been dropped in favor of the familiar .txt extension. It makes more sense in that AsciiDoc is a text presentation format and because .asc clashed with the same extension used by other applications. It's only a naming convention — you don't have to switch if you don't want to.

• Changed the subscript formatting character from underline to tilde since underscores in file names are reasonably common (especially in link and image macros).

• An alternative syntax for the index term inline macro has been added: <primary>,<secondary>,<tertiary>.

• Index terms that have secondary and tertiary entries now additionally generate separate index terms for the secondary and tertiary entries.

• A <primary> index term inline macro has been added which displays the term in the primary text flow.

• Added alternative variable list definition using double semi-colon terminator as opposed to the standard double colon terminator so variable lists can be nested to two levels.

• Footnotes now appear on a separate line in HTML and Linuxdoc outputs.

• Python version compatibility is checked at startup.

• Preface and appendix section titles in multi-part Book documents are meant to be out of sequence — warnings are no longer emitted when outputting HTML.

• Empty section warnings have been replaced by error messages and are emitted only if invalid markup would result.

• Missing macro sections or invalid macro name warnings are only generated at startup if the -v (verbose) option is set. Otherwise they are deferred until a matching macro is encountered in the input file.

• Missing or invalid table definition warnings are only generated at startup if the -v (verbose) option is set. Otherwise they are deferred until a matching table is encountered in the input file.

• AsciiDoc now makes more of an effort to continue in the face of errors.

• Fixed broken ./examples/website/main.aap script.

• Converted distribution text files DOS text format as a sop to Windows users with challenged text editors.

• Documentation additions and corrections.

• Spurious out of sequence level 2 warnings no longer appear when processing book document multi-part book top level Preface and Appendix sub-sections since they are (correctly) out of sequence.

• A warning is no longer emitted for empty Index sections since this is normal when generating DocBook outputs.

• Fixed: [quotes] configuration file entries where not being overridden by downstream configuration file entries.

• Footnote text is now output enclosed in square brackets in HTML documents.

• Added superscripts and subscripts to the standard PRS configuration files.

• Adjusted CSS stylesheets so list titles don't have so much space between title and first list item (broken in IE6 due to poor CSS compliance). Lessened sidebar title top margin.

• The version 5.0.6 README incorrectly stated that AsciiDoc would run under Python 2.0, in fact it requires Python 2.1 or better. The README has been corrected.

• Documented techniques for combining and splitting AsciiDoc documents and processing the combined and split parts (see the Tips and Tricks section of the User Guide).

• An example of marking up superscripts and subscripts is documented in the Tips and Tricks section of the User Guide (the example configuration file is in the AsciiDoc examples directory).

• Added ellipsis to shipped [replacements]; three periods output an ellipsis entity.

• Removed unused SectionClose class.

• The AsciiDoc Preamble element is output as a DocBook Preface when processed as a book document type (in older AsciiDoc versions a warning was issued and processing stopped).

• Fixed a quoting anomaly: quoted text can no longer begin or end with with white space.

• New image macro implements optional image scaling and linking and works in both inline and block contexts. The image macro obsolesces the existing graphic block macro and icon inline macro.

• Macro substitution section names now have -inlinemacro and -blockmacro suffixes to resolve context ambiguity, make their purpose clearer and relieve section namespace congestion.

• Header derived glossary entries can now be overridden from the command-line.

• Special character substitution is now performed on AuthorLine derived author names.

• A macro or block argument called options can be used as a shortcut for a list named arguments with zero length string values.

• Tables can be output without borders using the options="noborders" argument.

• Table data lines that do not immediately follow a table section underline can now be blank. This allows CSV data with embedded blank lines to be processed correctly.

• Blank DSV format table data lines are silently skipped.

• Tightened up on enforcement of configuration file section names to reduce the possibility of section content being seen as a section header line.

• Section titles can be optionally suffixed with title arguments enclosed in double square brackets.

• A replacement has been added to asciidoc.conf to replace inline double dashes with the &mdash; entity.

• Changed the .UNDER-CONSTRUCTION. macro syntax to #UNDER-CONSTRUCTION# so it is not mistaken for a BlockTitle. Similarly changed the .NEW. replacement with #NEW#.

• #NEW# and #UNDER-CONSTRUCTION# macros are now included in the DocBook backend.

• Replaced shipped smallnew.gif with smallnew.png.

• Documentation tidy ups.

• Fixed the disappearing paragraph titles problem that was caused by Inline macros (incorrectly) processing BlockTitles.

• Tightened AuthorLine validation. Previously invalid email addresses and embedded special characters in the AuthorLine resulted in invalid output markup.

• Reinstated missing infile, outfile, filetype and filetype-<filetype> glossary entries.

• As of version 5.0.3 asciidoc(1) now requires Python 2.0 or greater, this has now been documented.

• Fixed problem that caused any filters directory file containing .conf (not just those with the .conf extension) from being loaded.

• All [miscellaneous] configuration file entries can now be referenced like glossary entries (they are now processed internally as glossary entries).

• The output file line terminator (previously hardwired to \r\n is now set using the newline entry in the configuration file [miscellaneous] section.

• The misspelt blocktitles configuration file entry name has been corrected (to blocktitle).

• An {empty} glossary entry has been added to the default configuration which is useful for outputting trailing blank lines from configuration file substitution sections.

• New (alternative) anchor and xref macro syntax (old syntax still valid).

• DocBook mediaobject and inlinemediaobject tags are generated in place of graphic and inlinegraphic tags by the AsciiDoc graphic and icon macros. If a macro argument is specified it is the alternative text output if the target document format does not support the specified graphic file format.

• Dropped the LinuxDoc left and right square bracket special character substitutions as they interfered with macro substitution.

• Documentation updates and corrections.

• Fixed problem with anchor tag when generating CSS styled HTML.

• AsciiDoc can now produce a full-blown multi-part DocBook book including dedication, abstract, preface, colophon, glossary, appendix, bibliography and book part elements using the new specialsections configuration file section.

• All Section element children (Paragraph, DelimitedBlock, List, Table, BlockMacro) can now be titled using the BlockTitle element. A BlockTitle element is a single line containing a title and beginning with a period.

• The index and backmatter macros have been dropped, superseded by specialsections.

• The AsciiDoc Preface element has been renamed Preamble (to avoid confusion with the DocBook book preface element).

• Out of sequence titles are now tolerated with a warning. This allows book document level 0 sections to be processed.

• An anchor inline macro has been added for document link target creation.

• Note, Tip, Important and Warning paragraph types have been added to support the corresponding DocBook elements.

• Title substitution is now performed in SidebarBlock titles.

• DocBook graphics now output as figure and informalfigure elements rather than mediaobjects. This ensures numbered figures and a lists of figures are produced by the DocBook toolchain.

• You can now escape block argument lines by appending a backslash. Alternatively, if you embed arguments in the delimiter line AsciiDoc does not check for an arguments line.

• The default DocBook backend file extension has been changed from .docbook to .xml (.sgml for the docbook-sgml backend).

• Warnings are output by default (previously they only printed when verbose option enabled).

• A Question and Answer variable list definition has been added to the shipped configuration files, primarily to create DocBook qanda DocBook elements.

• Fixed broken code-filter -b linuxdoc option. The asciidoc.asc User Guide can now be processed by linuxdoc(1) (although tables are dropped because LinuxDoc does not implement tables).

1. Table titles are no longer in the arguments line, use the new BlockTitles.

2. Graphic titles are no longer in the graphic block macro caption, use the new BlockTitles.

3. The code-filter title must be placed in a preceding BlockTitle.

4. SidebarBlock titles must be placed in a preceding BlockTitle.

5. The DelimitedBlock option sidebar has been renamed to section.

6. The default DocBook backend file extension has been changed from .docbook to .xml (.sgml for the docbook-sgml backend).

• The default HTML output is now XHTML 1.0 markup. To output the former HTML 4 markup specify the html-4 backend.

• The default DocBook output is now DocBook XML. To output the former DocBook SGML specify the docbook-sgml backend. The associated docbook-sgml.conf file illustrates how to support minor DTD variations. Examples of using the xmlto(1) command for DocBook conversion have been added to the User Guide.

• Glossary entries set using the command-line -g option can now be referenced in configuration files.

• Configuration dumps (-c command-line option) no longer output redundant undefined glossary entries.

• DelimitedBlock arguments can now be specified in a separate arguments line immediately following the leading delimiter line, This is in preference to the existing delimiter embedded arguments. Reasons:

  • The syntax is in keeping with the Tables arguments syntax.

  • It's easier to enter and implements line continuation.

• A new QuoteBlock DelimitedBlock definition has been added to the distribution configuration files.

• The table arguments lines can be continued using the backslash line continuation character.

• Added new calculated glossary reference type {<name>%<value>}.

• Double-quote characters can now appear in unquoted positional arguments.

• Added DSV (Delimiter Separated Values) tables format.

• {eval:<expr>} glossary references drop the containing line if <expr> evaluates to None.

• Block, Table and Macro arguments can now be positional (quoted or unquoted).

• Vocabulary change: DelimitedBlock, Table and Macro attributes are now referred to as arguments. This makes more sense in light of the extended syntax and avoids confusion with backend markup tag attributes.

• tablewidth table ruler parameter can now be expressed in percent units (0..100). If between 0 and 1 then the original fractional unit measure is applied.

• The use of quoting for generating footnotes and index entries has been dropped in favor of footnote and indexterm inline macros.

• backmatter inline macro included in distribution.

• Fixed: CSS styled HTML tables are now fully XHTML 1.0 conformant.

• Fixed: tablewidth was processed incorrectly when passed as table argument.

• Fixed: Glossary references like {x={y}} were one character off if {x] was defined and {y} was not.

• Added tables to AsciiDoc.

• Added two special subs options: default specifies the default substitution options and none specifies no substitution. These options can only appear singly.

• Line continuation using a trailing backslash character is available in Paragraphs, ListItems, Tables.

• The left and right quotes for quoted text can now be specified separately.

• Shipped configuration files implement footnotes (only useful for DocBook output) using \[[]] quoting.

• Shipped configuration files implement index terms (only useful for DocBook and LinuxDoc output) using \(()) quoting.

• The shipped html backend configuration now emits valid HTML 4.01 Transitional.

• Added new calculated glossary reference types {<name>!<value>} and {<name>#<value>}.

• The DelimitedBlock params option has been dropped in favor of the new block attributes mechanism. If you have customized block params options you may need to adjust source files to use the block attributes syntax. The example code filter has been updated to reflect these changes.

• The code filter now has a -t tabsize option.

• Replaced -w option with -v (verbose) option. The warnings option was just to confusing.

• Named attributes can now be specified in macro calls.

• The tabsize attribute is recognized in the built-in include macros. A tabsize of zero suppresses tab expansion.

• The configuration file [options] section has been split into [miscellaneous] and [titles]. If you have customized any of these settings you will need to adjust the affected configuration files.

• Configuration file [miscellaneous] entries can now also be set using the command-line -g option.

• Fixed: error that occurred when attempting to use zero length configuration and source files.

• Fixed: blocking filter halt problem.

• Fixed: inline macro escape prefix problem.

• Fixed: missing macros from configuration dump problem.

• Fixed: named macros were dumped incorrectly.

• Many documentation changes/additions/corrections.

• Added -n option (synonym for -g section-numbers).

• Dropped the processing commentary (hey, this is Unix).

• Added new calculated glossary reference type {<name>?<value>}. <name> is the glossary entry name and <value> is the text substituted if the glossary entry is defined. <value> can only contain literal text (no glossary references allowed).

• Added asciidoc2text to distribution examples/asciidoc2text directory (converts AsciiDoc source to text file with section numbering).

• Fixed incorrect nesting of Simple lists inside Variable lists.

• List definitions have been modified so that list items can be indented. This allows a more intuitive indentation of nested lists in AsciiDoc source.

• Lists must be separated from preceding paragraphs by a blank line. This is to avoid paragraph lines being mistaken for list items.

• Corrected asciidoc man page documentation error: the`-f` option does not search relative to source document directory for the configuration file.

• Minor updates to various distribution .conf files.

• Included badges.conf in examples directory.

• css-embedded-stylesheet.conf now supports footer badges.

• The default in-line element processing order has been changed: Glossary References are now processed before Inline Macros. This allows glossary expansions to occur inside macro references.

• Glossary entries are now allowed in Author and Revision lines.

• Default List subs options and Paragraph presubs options are assigned the following default value if not specified:

  specialcharacters,quotes,specialwords,replacements,glossary,macros

• Documentation changes/additions/corrections.

• Added a -s command-line option to suppress the output of [header] and [footer] sections.

• Article document headers are no longer mandatory: this allows AsciiDoc to process arbitrary chunks of text. When used in conjunction with the new -s command-line option corresponding chunks of backend markup can be generated.

• AsciiDoc now emits a warning message and continues when an out of sequence section title is detected (previously it failed and halted). This allows document sections to be processed separately.

• Optional presubs and postsubs entries have been added to DelimitedBlock and Paragraph definitions. As a consequence substitution options are no longer legal in options entries.

• presubs and postsubs substitutions are processed in the order the options are specified (rather than the fixed options order of previous versions).

• ./filters subdirectories are automatically searched for filter commands.

• A title-subs configuration option specifies the substitutions performed on document Header and Section titles.

• A subs entry in now included in List configuration file definitions that specified substitutions performed on list entry text.

• Configuration files are auto-loaded from ./filters subdirectories.

• Added example code filter (see ./examples/filters).

• Bug fix: if section was empty you may have got erroneous missing tag "paragraph" error.

• Internal code tidy up.

• In version 3.0 a [macros] section entry of the form name was equivalent to name=. An entry of the form name now undefines the entry (to bring it in line with the behavior of other special sections).

• Paragraphs have now been generalized (in the same way as Lists and DelimitedBlocks).

• The indentsize option has been dropped as as consequence of paragraph generalization.

• Pipe | characters can be included in substituted tag and substitution section text using the {brvbar} (broken vertical bar) glossary reference.

• Removed the restriction requiring substitution section text placeholders | to be on a separate line.

• Added an -e asciidoc(1) command option that excludes implicit configuration files (used in conjunction with -c generated configuration files).

• Version 3.0 documentation has undergone a considerable cleanup.

• The dumping of quoted section entries (see -c option) now works correctly.

• The format of special section entries has been made consistent: name undefines the entry; name= sets the entry value to a blank string; name=value sets the entry value to value.

• As a consequence of the previous change the caret prefix is no longer used in glossary configuration file entries (although it is still used when undefining an entry using the -g command-line option).

This version is the culmination of work begun in the 2.x releases whereby fixed policy has been replaced by extensible mechanisms.

• Added -c command-line option to dump a composite asciidoc(1) configuration file to stdout.

• Lists and Delimited Blocks are now defined by a set of configuration file parameter sections. The user can modify the default definitions or add new ones.

• Block content can now be processed through external filters.

• The default behavior for Custom Blocks is to perform glossary substitution (previously there was no substitution inside Custom Blocks).

• The old 2.x style macros have been reimplemented; as with Lists and Delimited Blocks there syntax and behavior can be configured by the user. The default macro syntax remains the same but the semantics are now (hopefully) a bit more intelligible.

• Block and Builtin macros use :: delimiter instead of the 2.x single colon delimit (to distinguish them from inline macros). The 2.x syntax is still supported for backward compatibility.

• Nested lists are now supported and IndentedParagraphs can be included in list items.

• Conditional source inclusion can be specified using built in ifdef, ifndef and endif macros.

• The new conditional source inclusion feature has been used to reduce the number of default configuration files down to one per backend.

• A change of name: 2.x Substitutions are now called Replacements and the 2.x [substitutions] configuration file section is now called [replacements] (the old name is still recognized for backward compatibility).

• The line break is now implemented as a Replacements substitution.

• Inline icon macro for inline images has been added to default configuration files.

• The master.conf configuration file name has been deprecated in favor of asciidoc.conf.

• The standard configuration files set is now loaded from the .asciidoc folder in the users home directory (if it exists) and then from the source document directory. Configuration files that don't exist are silently skipped.

• 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.asc and the -b html option is used then asciidoc(1) will look for mydoc.conf and mydoc-html.conf in that order.

• The characters used to quote formatted text can be configured and extended by the user (see the master.conf [quotes] section).

• Quoted text can now be escaped by prefixing a backslash character to the leading quote.

• The double single-quote '' strong text quote has been deprecated in favor of an asterisk * character.

• Added {eval:expression}, {sys:command} and {sys2:command} glossary reference actions.

• Trailing brace characters } are now allowed inside glossary references provided they are escaped with a backslash character.

• Glossary entries can now be escaped by prefixing a backslash character to the leading brace character (use this in preference to placing the backslash inside the brace).

• The output macro has been deprecated (use the new include1 macro inside a CustomBlock).

• The default document type is article (asciidoc no longer attempts to guess).

• Files included within DelimitedBlocks are not searched for block termination underlines. This ensures the entire file is part of the DelimitedBlock.

• include macros can now be used in configuration files.

• Corrected {infile} and {outfile} glossary entry documentation.

• File inclusion is now limited to a depth of 5 to catch recursion loops.

• Inline tags have been deprecated, they're not necessary and they immediately make the source document backend specific. Use CustomBlocks or Substitutions instead.

• Added section auto numbering {sectnum} glossary entry (auto-numbering function contributed by Ludovico Magnocavallo).

• asciidoc(1) now correctly returns non-zero exit status if an error occurs.

• An AsciiDoc example website has been included in the AsciiDoc distribution examples/website directory (also online at http://www.methods.co.nz/asciidoc/examples/website/).

• NOTE: The asciidoc wrapper script included in the 2.0 distribution has been dropped, if you've symlinked or aliased to asciidoc you'll need to change them to point directly to asciidoc.py instead.

• An RCS $Id$ marker can be used as the document header revision line (based on a patch submitted by Ludovico Magnocavallo).

• In addition to the name=value glossary entry format two new ones have been introduced: name (the default value is set to an empty string) and ^name (the glossary entry is undefined).

• The -q command-line option has been deprecated and the -w level command-line option added.
  NOTE: By default skipped substitution warnings are now suppressed.

• If a configuration file specified with the -f command-line option is not found relative to the current working directory then the search is repeated relative to the asciidoc(1) directory. This allows global configuration files to be used.

• Added {infile}, {outfile} predefined glossary entries.

• Added under-construction macro to HTML article configuration files.

• Deprecated {asciidoc_version} glossary entry in favor of {asciidoc-version} (to it consistent with other entries).

• The emphasized, strong and monospaced words options have been generalized with the introduction of macro based special words lists.

• Glossary references can now appear in both the document and macro bodies.

• All output files use crlf line termination (previously used UNIX lf (newline) termination).

• Added [substitutions] section which implements arbitrary regular expression based substitutions.

• An optional master.conf configuration file can be used for entries that are not backend or document type specific.

• Special character definitions moved from the code to the new [special_characters] configuration file section.

• Configuration file glossary added.

• Command-line -g glossary entry added.

• A new book document type has been implemented for the docbook backend. It outputs DocBook book documents.

• A major internal change has been the implementation of parametrized user definable macros. Internally most document elements are now processed as macros.

• Configuration file macro variables can be specified with default values (literals or other macro variables).

• An attempt has been made to tighten up the vocabulary used to describe the AsciiDoc document syntax.

• The term abstract has been replaced by the more general term preface and a new preface section introduced into article configuration files (replacing the synopsis sections).

• Any section elements can now be put in the document preface (previous versions only allowed paragraphs).

• AsciiDoc Blocks have been unified and their behavior can be user defined and parametrized.

• An output inclusion allows an external file to be written directly to the backend output file.

• A new CustomBlock has been added. Default behavior is to insert the enveloped AsciiDoc source lines directly into the output file.

• A line break tag can be inserted by terminating a line with a + character (only really useful for HTML backends).

• An fourth section level has been introduced.

• The SidebarBlock delimiter line characters have been changed. The deprecated underline is still accepted.

• Levels 2 and 3 title underline characters have been changed. The deprecated underlines are still accepted.

• Lines with backend specific inline tags can be inserted into AsciiDoc source files.

• Single words enveloped by underscores are no longer emphasized. This feature was deprecated as it is redundant (use single quotes instead) and was being applied to file names with underscores.

• A -q quiet option has been added to suppress warning messages.

• Badge images sourced locally.

• Added author and author-mail meta tags to HTML configuration files.

• Implemented sidebar document elements.

• Explicit checks for user specified configuration files and input file (rather than throwing exception).

• New configuration file options emphasizedwords and strongwords. These allow the definition of words that will always be emphasized or rendered in a strong font without inline formatting.

• Document and section titles are no long subject to inline formatting.

• Multiple configuration files can be overlaid in a single command.

• Configuration file tags and options entries can now be overridden on an entry by entry basis (previously the entire section was overloaded).

• Configuration file tags and options entries are now cached this has resulted in around 37% performance improvement over version 1.3.

• Variable lists can now contain multiple terms per list item.

• Placeholder paragraph eliminated from empty sections that contain subsections.

• Added {asciidoc_version} substitution variable.

• More documentation additions and tidy ups.

• A new strong text formatting convention has been implemented: Word phrases enclosed in pairs of single quote characters (acute accents) are rendered in a strong font (usually bold).

• Paragraphs can now be followed immediately by Simple lists and Ordered lists without an intervening blank line.

• A user specified configuration file (asciidoc(1) -f option) overlays the default configuration file rather than replacing it. Custom configuration files need only contain those sections that have been customized.

• Comment Block delimiters have been relaxed slightly. They must start with three forward slashes /// but the remainder can contain any characters, this allows comments to be embedded in the delimiter line.

• Leading non-digit characters preceding revision number are now ignored.

• Set default indentsize [option] from 2 to documented default value of zero in HTML backend html-article.conf and html-manpage.conf files.

• Fixed error that occurred when taking input from stdin without explicitly specifying a document type.

• Restored file name and line number error message information.

• Changed deprecated -t option to -d in asciidoc —help and usage command output.

• CSS styles tweaking.

• Code, configuration file and documentation tidy ups.

• Implemented include URL to allow file inclusion.

• fileextension configuration file [option] renamed to more sensible outfilesuffix (fileextension still accepted by this version but will be dropped in future).

• Improved error reporting.

• CSS backends generate valid XHTML.

• New css-embedded backend generates HTML with embedded stylesheets (use the css backend for linked stylesheets). The css-embedded backend output contains no linked images so the generated html files are completely self contained.

• Bug fixes.

• Added css (cascading style sheets) backend

• Implemented IndentedBlock document element.

• Tabsize command-line option has been deprecated in favor of configuration file.

• Default indent width changed to zero.

• Added {localdate} and {localtime} substitution variables.

• Added optional [options] configuration file section with fileextension, tabsize and indentsize options.

• Implemented {authorinitials} substitution variable.

• Added https link type.

• Corrected [graphic] substitution from {title} to {caption} in linuxdoc-article.conf configuration file.

• Fixed error that occurred when == title underline was used.

First AsciiDoc public release along with AsciiDoc web site (http://www.methods.co.nz/asciidoc/) and SourceForge.net project registration (https://sourceforge.net/projects/asciidoc/).