At NumberFour, we use AsciiDoc for our specifications and documentation. We are even working on producing AsciiDoc API documentation from JSDoc-like comments (similar to JavaDoc) for our JavaScript language N4JS. Since we ran into a couple of problems with AsciiDoctor, I thought that it might be interesting to learn what other people in the Eclipse Community think about AsciiDoc(tor) and if we might be able to "join forces" to overcome certain obstacles. So I organized a "Birds of Feather" about "Documentation with AsciiDoc and Eclipse" at EclipseCon 2016 Europe. We were about 10 participants and this blog post serves more or less as a kind of meeting minutes of this BoF combined with our findings at NumberFour.
AsciiDoc is a lightweight markup language, similar to Markdown. The original AsciiDoc was written in Python, but Asciidoctor, probably the most popular tool nowadays, is written in Ruby with a variant AsciidoctorJ which provides Java support (via JRuby) and Asciidoctor.js for JavaScript (via Opal). From an Asciidoc document (.adoc) you can either create HTML, PDF or even EPub. Unfortunately, the PDF support is lacking some major features (e.g., footnotes are not supported yet), but there is a common workaround to produce DocBook XML files from AsciiDoctor and then use FOP to eventually create a beautiful PDF. Lars Vogel wrote a nice tutorial about AsciiDoc and AsciiDoctor. One of the great things about AsciiDoc is that GitHub provides basic support for AsciiDoc as well!
Writing AsciiDoc
The first question is how to write AsciiDoc. One solution is to use stand-alone editors such as Sublime (there is an AsciiDoc plug-in for syntax highlighting and coce completion which, together with the preview plug-in, is a really great solution).
But usually, you do not want to switch editors when you are already using Eclipse. Fortunately, there's an existing AsciiDoc editor which is part of Mylyn Wiki Text. This editor has some syntax highlighting, an outline view and even a preview.
This editor seems to be a good starting point for further support of AsciiDoc on the Eclipse platform, although it might have some shortcomings with regard to features and design. Regardless, the BoF participants (including Torkild, a Mylyn Docs committer) decided to use the mylyn-docs developers mailing list for further communication about AsciiDoc and Eclipse.
Apparently, having a good editor, possibly even with WYSIWYG or at least WYSIWYM support is one of the most important things required.
Building AsciiDoc
There are several ways of building AsciiDoc. The most simple one is about using the AsciiDoctor tools directly from the command line. There is also a Maven plugin provided by the AsciiDoctor project.
We haven't discussed that topic any further though. It seems as if the existing tools are sufficient even though there are some shortcomings when using custom macros as described below. You may have a look at the N4JS documentation pom.xml to get an idea of how this could look like.
Converting to AsciiDoc
During the BoF, the question came up how to convert existing documentation written in other formats to Asciidoc. One solution for that is Pandoc, which we (at NumberFour) are using to convert our LaTeX specification to Asciidoc. Jeremie Bresson has already blogged about the BoF and even provided a solution for using Mylyn Wikitext to convert Eclipse MediaWiki to Asciidoc. Thank you very much, Jeremie!
Using AsciiDoc as a Single Source
I already mentioned above that you can generate HTML and PDF from AsciiDoc. However, HTML is not HTML. We use AsciiDoc to generate
- the public web site (i.e., gh-pages)
- the Eclipse help
- the PDF specification
from a single asciidoc file. To give you an idea, have a look at an adoc source file and the generated web page. If you download the N4JS IDE, you can also have a look at the generated Eclipse help containing the same content. The PDF is not publicly available yet, we are currently working on migrating our language specification from LaTeX to AsciiDoc.
In order to generate Eclipse help, a table of contents file is required. At the moment, we generate them via the geneclipsetoc-maven-plugin Maven plugin, see our pom.xml for our configuration.
You may also use the Mylyn Docs to generate code, which is described in the Mylyn Docs Eclipse help. This also provides support for generating EPub, the first steps towards this support has already been described 2011 in Torkild's blog! It’s now a stable part of Mylyn Docs and has been for a few years. Currently it is in maintenance mode as there are few bugs and there is not much to add – apart for EPUB 3.0 support. You can find an EPUB examples (and presentations about Mylyn Docs in general) on Torkild's GitHub page.
Customizing AsciiDoc
Although AsciiDoc provides a lot of features ("macros" in Asciidoc terminology) for technical documentation, such as source blocks, warning blocks etc., we (at NumberFour) missed some functionality. We required additional support for
- definitions -- a typical feature required in specifications
- BibTex cites and bibliographies -- we already have a large BibTex database which we want to reuse
- todos -- well, also a typical feature required in specifications and documentations
- links to source code -- e.g., for adding links to either GitHub, or, in case of Eclipse help, to the files in the workspace
- larger documents, e.g., includes similar to LaTeX's chapter folders
One problem we found is that Ruby-based custom macros calling native code cannot be used with AscidoctorJ. E.g., there already exists a custom Ruby macro which provides support for BibTex, but this does not work with AscidoctorJ. We want to write the macros in Java, since we plan to provide some editor support in Eclipse as well -- and then Java would be the better solution. Thus we already wrote our own Java-based, BibTex macro (fixing some smaller AsciidoctorJ problems on the way) and we are also working on solutions for the other topics. If you are interested in that, or if you have written Java-based macros for AsciiDoc as well -- let me know! We haven't open sourced our custom macros yet since they are still under (heavy) development. But we will probably do that once they are in a state to make them public.
Edit: Updated description of EPUB support -- thank you Torkild for the information!
