AsciiDoc User Guide

See the README and INSTALL files for install prerequisites and procedures. Packagers take a look at Packager Notes.

The best way to quickly get a feel for AsciiDoc is to view the AsciiDoc web site and/or distributed examples:

Used for short documents, articles and general documentation. See the AsciiDoc distribution ./doc/article.txt example.

AsciiDoc defines standard DocBook article frontmatter and backmatter section markup templates (appendix, abstract, bibliography, glossary, index).

Books share the same format as articles, with the following differences:

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 defines standard DocBook book frontmatter and backmatter section markup templates (appendix, dedication, preface, bibliography, glossary, index, colophon).

Used to generate roff format UNIX manual pages. AsciiDoc manpage documents observe special header title and section naming conventions — see the Manpage Documents section for details.

AsciiDoc defines the synopsis section markup template to generate the DocBook refsynopsisdiv section.

See also the asciidoc(1) man page source (./doc/asciidoc.1.txt) from the AsciiDoc distribution.

Backend aliases are alternative names for AsciiDoc backends. AsciiDoc comes with two backend aliases: html (aliased to xhtml11) and docbook (aliased to docbook45).

You can assign (or reassign) backend aliases by setting an AsciiDoc attribute named like backend-alias-<alias> to an AsciiDoc backend name. For example, the following backend alias attribute definitions appear in the [attributes] section of the global asciidoc.conf configuration file:

The asciidoc(1) --backend option is also used to install and manage backend plugins.

DocBook files are validated, parsed and translated various presentation file formats using 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, EPUB, 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, EPUB, 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. In addition to asciidoc(1) you also need xsltproc(1), DocBook XSL Stylesheets and optionally: dblatex or FOP (to generate PDF); w3m(1) or lynx(1) (to generate 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:

See the a2x(1) man page for details.

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 (for example, see the AsciiDoc website).

There are two commonly used tools to generate PDFs from DocBook, dblatex and FOP.

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-xsl.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. These drivers are also used by a2x(1).

If you want to see how the complete documentation set is processed take a look at the A-A-P script ./doc/main.aap.

The AsciiDoc theme attribute is used to select an alternative CSS stylesheet and to optionally include additional JavaScript code.

For example, the command-line option --theme foo (or --attribute theme=foo) will cause asciidoc(1) to search configuration file locations 1 for a sub-directory called themes/foo containing the stylesheet foo.css and optionally a JavaScript file name foo.js.

Block elements consist of one or more lines of text and may contain other block elements.

The AsciiDoc block structure can be informally summarized as follows
[This is a rough structural guide, not a rigorous syntax definition]
:

Where:

The Header contains document meta-data, typically title plus optional authorship and revision information:

Here’s an example AsciiDoc document header:

The author information line contains the author’s name optionally followed by the author’s email address. The author’s name is formatted like:

i.e. a first name followed by optional middle and last names followed by an email address in that order. Multi-word first, middle and last names can be entered using the underscore as a word separator. The email address comes last and must be enclosed in angle <> brackets. Here a some examples of author information lines:

If the author line does not match the above specification then the entire author line is treated as the first name.

The optional revision information line follows the author information line. The revision information can be one of two formats:

You can override or set header parameters by passing revnumber, revremark, revdate, email, author, authorinitials, firstname and lastname attributes using the asciidoc(1) -a (--attribute) command-line option. For example:

Attribute entries can also be added to the header for substitution in the header template with Attribute Entry elements.

The title element in HTML outputs is set to the AsciiDoc document title, you can set it to a different value by including a title attribute entry in the document header.

The Preamble is an optional untitled section body between the document Header and the first Section title.

In addition to the document title (level 0), AsciiDoc supports four section levels: 1 (top) to 4 (bottom). Section levels are delimited by section titles. Sections are translated using configuration file section markup templates. AsciiDoc generates the following intrinsic attributes specifically for use in section markup templates:

Inline document elements are used to format text and to perform 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:

Words and phrases can be formatted by enclosing inline text with quote characters:

New quote types can be defined by editing asciidoc(1) configuration files. See the Configuration Files section for details.

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:

Is rendered like:

e^πi+1 = 0. H₂O and x¹⁰. Some ^{super text} and _{some sub text}

Superscripts and subscripts are implemented as unconstrained quotes and 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).

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). 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).

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:

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:

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:

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.

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 two characters):

The default title underlines for each of the document levels are:

Examples:

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:

Setting the title’s first positional attribute or style 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:

Floating titles do not appear in a document’s table of contents.

By default, only substitutions that take place inside attribute list values are attribute references, 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.

Most block elements support the following attributes:

Normal paragraph syntax consists 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 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.

The literal style is applied implicitly to indented paragraphs i.e. where the first line of the paragraph is indented by one or more space or tab characters. For example:

Renders:

Instead of using a paragraph indent you could apply the literal style explicitly, for example:

Renders:

The optional attribution and citetitle attributes (positional attributes 2 and 3) specify the author and source respectively.

The verse style retains the line breaks, for example:

Which is rendered as:

The quote style flows the text at left and right margins, for example:

Which is rendered as:

TIP, NOTE, IMPORTANT, WARNING and CAUTION admonishment paragraph styles are generated by placing NOTE:, TIP:, IMPORTANT:, WARNING: or CAUTION: as the first word of the paragraph. For example:

Alternatively, you can specify the paragraph admonition style explicitly using an AttributeList element. For example:

Renders:

AsciiDoc ships with a number of predefined DelimitedBlocks (see the asciidoc.conf configuration file in the asciidoc(1) program directory):

Predefined delimited block underlines:

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:

Which will be rendered like:

By convention filter blocks use the listing block syntax and are implemented as distinct listing block styles.

LiteralBlocks are rendered just like literal paragraphs. Example:

Renders:

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).

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:

Which will be rendered like:

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:

See also Comment Lines.

By default the block contents is subject only to attributes and macros substitutions (use an explicit subs attribute to apply different substitutions). PassthroughBlock content will often be backend specific. Here’s an example:

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 behavior is identical to quote and verse paragraphs except that blocks can contain multiple paragraphs and, in the case of the quote style, other section elements. The first positional attribute sets the style, if no attributes are specified the quote style is used. The optional attribution and citetitle attributes (positional attributes 2 and 3) specify the quote’s author and source. For example:

Which is rendered as:

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 will normally automatically number examples and generate a List of Examples backmatter section.

Example blocks are delimited by lines of equals characters and can contain any block elements apart from Titles, BlockTitles and Sidebars) inside an example block. For example:

Renders:

A title prefix that can be inserted with the caption attribute (HTML backends). For example:

The ExampleBlock definition includes a set of admonition styles (NOTE, TIP, IMPORTANT, WARNING, CAUTION) for generating admonition blocks (admonitions containing more than a single paragraph). Just precede the ExampleBlock with an attribute list specifying the admonition style name. For example:

Renders:

See also Admonition Icons and Captions.

Open blocks are special:

Open blocks are used to generate document abstracts and book part introductions:

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 numbers are explicit or implicit.

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:

List items begin one to five period characters, followed by some white space then the item text. Examples:

You can use the style attribute (also the first positional 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:

Which render as:

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:

You can set the list start number using the start attribute (works for HTML outputs and DocBook outputs processed by DocBook XSL Stylesheets). Example:

Labeled list items consist of one or more text labels followed by the text of the list item.

An item label begins a line with an alphanumeric character hard against the left margin and ends with two, three or 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:

Which render as:

AsciiDoc comes pre-configured with a qanda style labeled list for generating DocBook question and answer (Q&A) lists. Example:

Renders:

AsciiDoc comes pre-configured with a glossary style labeled list for generating DocBook glossary lists. Example:

For working examples see the article.txt and book.txt documents in the AsciiDoc ./doc distribution directory.

AsciiDoc comes with a predefined bibliography bulleted list style generating DocBook bibliography entries. Example:

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.

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:

Renders:

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:

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:

Inline Macros occur in an inline element context. Predefined Inline macros include URLs, image and link macros.

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:

System macros are block macros that perform a predefined task and are hardwired into the asciidoc(1) program.

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). Passthroughs, by definition, take precedence over all other text substitutions.

Each entry in the configuration [macros] section is a macro definition which can take one of the following forms:

<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.

The following named groups can be used in macro <pattern> regular expressions and are available as markup template attributes:

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.

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.

Here are four psv cells (the second item spans two columns; the last contains an escaped separator):

csv is the quasi-standard row oriented Comma Separated Values (CSV) format commonly used to import and export spreadsheet and database data.

Tables can be customized by the following attributes:

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:

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:

For example, the following psv formatted cell will span two columns and the text will be centered and emphasized:

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). Table data can be formatted using the following predefined styles:

AsciiDoc makes a number of attributes available to table markup templates and tags. Column specific attributes are available when substituting the colspec cell data tags.

An alternative psv separator character ! can be used (instead of |) in nested tables. This allows 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:

A manpage 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:

The second manpage section is mandatory and must be titled SYNOPSIS.

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:

LaTeX math can be included in documents that are processed by dblatex(1). Example inline formula:

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 and html5 backends. To enable ASCIIMathML support you must define the asciimath attribute, for example using the -a asciimath command-line option. Example inline formula:

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 and html5 backends. 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:

For more examples see the AsciiDoc website or the distributed doc/latexmathml.txt file.

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.

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.

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:

The optional [miscellaneous] section specifies the following name=value options:

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:

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 characters are normally confined to those that resolve markup ambiguity (in the case of HTML and 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:

You can specify the left and right quote strings separately by separating them with a | character, for example:

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:

Unconstrained quotes are differentiated from constrained quotes by prefixing the tag name with a hash character, for example:

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:

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.

[replacements], [replacements2] and [replacements3] configuration file entries specify find and replace text and are formatted like:

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):

The only difference between the three replacement types is how they are applied. By default replacements and replacements2 are applied in normal substitution contexts whereas replacements3 needs to be configured explicitly and should only be used in backend configuration files.

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 from the following locations:

Configuration files from the above locations are loaded in the following order:

Where:

A variant of the Attribute Entry syntax allows configuration file section entries and markup template sections to be set from within an AsciiDoc document:

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:

It is exactly equivalent to a configuration file containing:

If the attribute list contains an attribute named options it is processed as a comma separated list of option names:

Macros calls are suffixed with an attribute list. The list may be empty but it cannot be omitted. List entries are used to pass attribute values to macro markup templates.

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 attribute names to calculate a substitution value. Conditional attribute references take the following forms:

The attribute <names> parameter normally consists of a single attribute name but it can be any one of the following:

Conditional attributes with single attribute names are evaluated first so they can be used inside the multi-attribute conditional <value>.

System attribute references generate the attribute text value by executing a predefined action that is parametrized by one or more arguments. The syntax is {<action>:<arguments>}.

A style is a set of block parameter bundled as a single named parameter. The following example defines a style named verbatim:

If a block’s attribute list contains a style attribute then the corresponding style parameters are be merged into the default block definition parameters.

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:

The normal paragraph definition has a couple of special properties:

Paragraph specific block parameter notes:

DelimitedBlock options values are:

presubs, postsubs and filter entries are ignored when sectionbody or skip options are set.

DelimitedBlock processing proceeds as follows:

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:

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:

If the filter command does not specify a directory path then asciidoc(1) recursively searches for the executable filter command:

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 unless the container directory also contains a file named __noautoload__ (see previous section). The __noautoload__ feature is used for filters that will be loaded manually using the --filter option.

AsciiDoc comes with a toy filter for highlighting source code keywords and comments. See also the ./filters/code/code-filter-readme.txt file.

The AsciiDoc distribution includes source, music, latex and graphviz filters, details are on the AsciiDoc website.

Filter plugins are a mechanism for distributing AsciiDoc filters. A filter plugin is a Zip file containing the files that constitute a filter. The asciidoc(1) --filter option is used to load and manage filer plugins.

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.

AsciiDoc diagnostic features are detailed in the Diagnostics appendix.

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 and use the leveloffset attribute to push them all down one level. For example:

The document titles in the included documents will now be processed as level 1 section titles, level 1 sections as level 2 sections and so on.

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:

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(1) can be used as a filter, so you can pipe chunks of text through it. For example:

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:

The conditional inclusion of DocBook SGML markup at the end of the distribution docbook45.conf file illustrates how to support minor DTD variations. The included sections override corresponding entries from preceding sections.

If you’ve ever tried to send someone an HTML document that includes stylesheets and images you’ll know that it’s not as straight-forward as exchanging a single file. AsciiDoc has options to create stand-alone documents containing embedded images, stylesheets and scripts. The following AsciiDoc command creates a single file containing embedded images, CSS stylesheets, and JavaScript (for table of contents and footnotes):

You can view the HTML file here: http://asciidoc.org/article-standalone.html

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 that they consider you a trusted source). This example creates a composite HTML configuration file for mydoc.txt:

Ship mydoc.txt, mydoc-html.conf, and asciidoc.py. With these three files (and a Python interpreter) the recipient can regenerate the HMTL output:

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):

Use xmllint(1) to check the AsciiDoc generated markup is both well formed and valid. Here are some examples:

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.

The online W3C Markup Validation Service is the defacto standard when it comes to validating HTML (it validates all HTML standards including HTML5).

The rationale for the changes can be found in the AsciiDoc CHANGELOG.