AsciiDoc is two things:
AsciiDoc belongs to the family of lightweight markup languages, the most renowned of which is Markdown. AsciiDoc stands out from this group because it supports all the structural elements necessary for drafting articles, technical manuals, books, presentations and prose. In fact, it’s capable of meeting even the most advanced publishing requirements and technical semantics.
Serving as testament of this fact, many O’Reilly authors including Matthew McCullough, Tim Berglund, Simon St.Laurent, Matt Neuburg and Ian Darwin have used AsciiDoc to write their books for that iconic technical library.
From the very beginning, AsciiDoc was designed to be a shorthand replacement for DocBook, one of the formats AsciiDoc can generate. AsciiDoc can also produce beautiful HTML5, PDFs, eBooks, man pages and even slide decks. It has you covered from first draft to publishing.
Now that we’ve established what AsciiDoc is, let’s consider why we need it.
As humans, we have no difficulty talking or thinking. In fact, we’re fluent in it. It’s an activity that just happens whenever a thought comes to mind.
Writing, on the other hand, rarely comes so easy.
When it’s time to write our thoughts down, we struggle to find the words—or, at least, how to arrange and organize them. That damn inner critic disrupts the stream of consciousness we coast on while talking or thinking.
It’s reasonable to conclude that writing is just hard.
Or is it?
[1]D. Allen, “What is AsciiDoc? Why do we need it? | Asciidoctor,”
, 2025. https://asciidoctor.org/docs/what-is-asciidoc/ (accessed Aug. 20, 2025).