For an interesting read about asciidoc see Living the Future of Technical Writing.

Consider installing Asciidoctor.

To convert asciidoc files to PDF, install dblatex from SlackBuilds.org. See documentation, PDF.

To highlight source listings, install source-highlight from SlackBuilds.org. See online manual. This:

[source,bash]
 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
 #!/bin/bash
 export LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------

renders as (…)

#!/bin/bash
export LANG=en_US.UTF-8

If asciidoc.vim is not available locally, download. Otherwise:

$ [[ -d $HOME/.vim/syntax ]] || mkdir -p $HOME/.vim/syntax
$ cp /usr/share/vim/vimVERSION/syntax/asciidoc.vim $HOME/.vim/syntax/

and see Appendix E. Vim Syntax Highlighter.

Highlighting can also work by inserting at the bottom of the file:

// vim: set syntax=asciidoc:

The user guide file is found in /usr/doc/asciidoc-VERSION/doc/asciidoc.txt. To make the AsciiDoc User Guide:

$ asciidoc -b xhtml11 -a icons -a iconsdir=/etc/asciidoc/images/icons FILENAME

and see /usr/doc/asciidoc-VERSION/doc/asciidoc.html. For more see asciidoc.org.

It is a convention for asciidoc files to have a .txt extension.

To organize the use of common variables in all files, make a directory include. Common paths, for example, can be put in a paths.txt as a series of:

:pathname: {pathname=/path/to/somewhere}

Then, at the header of each file put:

include::/path/to/include/paths.txt[]

and in text use as:

{pathname}/remaining/path

Any variable that can be defined in bash with NAME=“$(commands)” can also be defined in asciidoc as a system attribute. First define the attribute in the header section:

:NAME: {sys:commands}

then use in text as:

{NAME}

Linking to man pages in HTML is very useful. See man2html Mini HOWTO on how to set the infrastructure. To see grep(1) use

http://localhost/cgi-bin/man/man2html?1+grep[grep(1)]

To make an HTML file:

$ asciidoc -b xhtml11 FILENAME

To use icons, mainly for admonition paragraphs, add the options:

-a icons -a iconsdir=/etc/asciidoc/images/icons

To have a fixed-width HTML, add:

-a max-width=45em

To use additional custom CSS, add:

-a stylesheet=/path/to/stylesheet.css

It may be helpful to put an alias in .bashrc:

alias ad="/usr/bin/asciidoc.py \
  -b xhtml11 \
  -a icons -a max-width=45em \
  -a iconsdir=/etc/asciidoc/images/icons \
  -a stylesdir=/etc/asciidoc/stylesheets \
  -a stylesheet=/path/to/stylesheet.css"

To make a PDF file, first install dblatex. Then:

$ asciidoc -b docbook45 FILENAME

$ dblatex FILENAME.xml

Use txt2tags to convert asciidoc files to dokuwiki format for the Slackware Documentation Project:

$ txt2tags -i FILENAME.txt -o FILENAME.dw -t doku