A New Manual In AsciiDoc

Part 6

I don't even like to say it or even write it; reality has caught up with me in this project. I looked at the date of the last blog entry and was very shocked: January 14th, 2022.

I'll be honest, since that date I haven't written quite a bit on the new manual either. Of course, I recognized the problem a few months ago and even tried to find solutions. But unfortunately everything didn't really work out and I realized that I need support.

So I sat down with Antoni - with whom I had already written the Merlin 2 book in German language for the publishing house Hanser Verlag - and we relaunched the project. I know it's embarrassing. But sometimes you have to recognize and solve a problem, even if the problem is you.

I hope that together we will now finish the book in German in the first half of 2023, so that it can then be translated peu à peu into other languages.

Topic AsciiDoc

Nothing changes in the project itself, because Antoni knows our little wizard like inside out. From the markup language AsciiDoc remains set. After all, Antoni - like everyone else at ProjectWizards - has been writing in this dialect since about 2012.

Still, you have to look up the syntax every now and then. Here, Asciidoctor's help mode has proven to be very helpful.

Enter the following in the terminal:

asciidoctor --help syntax

You will get a help page in AsciiDoc notation as output. You can even convert this page directly to HTML:

asciidoctor --help syntax | asciidoctor -o syntax.html -

Tip: The "-" at the end of the line sets the output to standard output (STDOUT).
The result is an HTML page that looks like this.

Now you can append an Open command:

asciidoctor --help syntax | asciidoctor -o syntax.html - && open syntax.html

This will immediately display the page in your own browser.

So, now let's see how we get on in the next weeks.

In this sense - until next time ...